Education and prevention priority for Bell vet

Bell Bunya Veterinary Practice (BBVP) owner and vet Sam Duigan, has been working with producers in the Bell area and surrounds, since 2007.

She said she has a passion for educating clients, especially when she is on-farm, and uses the time as an opportunity to offer ideas and discuss plans for treatments and vaccinations.

"Client visits provide opportunity for surveillance, keeping an eye on things like cattle welfare and disease level status of the herd," she said.

"When you are on-farm you have a new set of eyes on the animals and that's how a lot of things are prevented.

"I think it's good to have vets doing a lot of these things, simply because we have that medical training.

"While you are working, you chat to producers about how they are managing this and that and how can we could do this better."

Ms Duigan said pregnancy-checks and welfare checks were part of the work she conducts to help producers increase productivity and profitability.

She sees around 10 to 15 clients per week for cattle pregnancy, and said the outcomes of the tests are key to helping producers make decisions about their business.

"With cattle prices are the way they are, people don't want to keep cattle that aren't producing," she said.

"If the cows are empty, they go through the sale yards or direct to slaughter, depending on their market. No one can afford to keep feeding empty cattle...primarily it's a business decision.

"It's seasonal, every autumn there is a massive spike in preg testing because people want to offload any empty cattle so they don't have to carry them through winter when there is less feed.

"Bull testing begins in late winter to make sure the bulls are working, prior to putting them out with the cows in spring or summer."

Ms Duigan said there used to be government vets that would keep and eye on things, especially in places like the top end of Australia, or around ports where livestock were being loaded or unloaded and there was potential for transmission of foreign diseases.

"It's important to have vets on farm to pick those sort of things," she said.

"Every job I go to, I will be chatting away and will ask some leading questions, which can drive discussion about some really important things like vaccination and biosecurity.

"If they have bought a couple of hundred heifers from a sale, I ask if they have been isolated from their old breeders? and could they introducing any new diseases?"

"There are a whole lot of things that are really important to discuss with clients. They are paying for you to be there, you may as well educate them and hopefully improve management practices that are key to their productivity."

"Education helps producers to make better decisions for their business."

Ms Duigan said there were specific issues that she sees when she visits properties during and in the aftermath of droughts that she treats that can be devastating for producers.

"When there is not enough food going around, there are number of metabolic type problems you see with cattle.

"The drought breaks and there's a rush of green pick, which all the cattle rush to," she said.

"They can't consume enough energy to look after their own body weight, let alone a calf growing inside them, or the milk they are trying to produce.

"There can also be an increase in toxicity issues because cattle will eat a lot of strange plants when they are hungry, that they wouldn't normally touch."

Ms Duigan started working at Bell Vets after she moved from St George, when her mother was sick in 2007.

She said she continued to work at Bell Vets, until the practice was limited to two consult days per week and became limited in their capacity to meet the needs of their clients.

"We weren't able to treat things like snake bites for example," she said

"People who have a dog bitten by a brown snake don't always have half an hour to drive to town. They are lucky to get here sometimes."

Ms Duigan established BBVP in May 2023, so that she could continue to provide support to her clients and ensure that there would be a full time vet in Bell.

"You build relationships with people. You go through a lot with them...I didn't want to leave them in the lurch," she said.

Vet Sophie Clacher, joined the practice after graduating from the University of Queensland. She had already completed her prac with the BBVP and was keen to work in a mixed practice but said there were a lot of her vets how prefer to specialise.

"A lot of young vets want to be the best at what they do...You can't be the best at absolutely everything in this job, because there is too much," she said.

"There were at least one hundred students graduating from UQ...all of my mates went mixed practice but we were the minority of the cohort.

"Some graduates go overseas and a large portion are international students and return home to work."

Ms Duigan said that it was important for vets to continue to stay abreast of information in an industry that is constantly changing. She said she is keen to keep learning and have her team do the same.

"Sophie is off to a conference next week, I did two webinars on Sunday, I'm very keen on keeping up to date with things, I think you really need to," she said.

"If you choose to do general practice, well guess what, you have a lot of areas you need to stay up to date with.

Ms Duigan said whilst she thrives on the variety of work offered by a mixed practice, she thinks there may not be many vets choosing to do general practice in the next twenty years.

"There are fewer new graduates that want to do a bit of everything, which is hard for rural clients who have maybe three cats, a dog, a couple of nags, sheep and pigs and cattle," she said.

"Insurance and litigation are becoming more of an issue...people are becoming more and more frightened of being pulled up in front of the Veterinary Surgeons Board.

"I know a lot of vets who are really worried about it and it drives their decision making.