This article is a guest post by the wonderful Andreia Dias from UK Vet Move.
No doubt that starting a veterinary career in the UK is a dream of many international vets, for many different reasons. For some, it’s the ability to keep doing what they love while traveling. For others, it’s about developing their skills.
We all also know that we are up for some challenges, but most overseas vets start to worry about the obvious challenges: registering with the RCVS, looking at visas and work permits, and actually finding a job.
Yes, they are all challenges, but they are obvious and we find a way to overcome them. The difficult ones are those that we know we might experience, only to have them hit us in the face, bringing us to the realisation that maybe they were more of a challenge than we thought at first. Here are some of these challenges as collected from the experience of colleagues from different countries:
1) Your skills may need to adapt to the new working environment.
Of the “hidden” challenges, this is the one that is most obvious. We do expect things to be slightly different, but a lot of times, they are actually very different from what we thought.
Not only certain procedures are performed in a different way (flank cat spays, anyone?), the veterinary systems and regulations are also quite different. Have you ever had to ask for help to write down a written prescription in the UK? Told off for holding down patients for x-rays? Micro-chipped a puppy on the left side of the neck?
And of course, on top of this, we still have a whole new list of differential diagnoses that have a completely different order from what we are used to. Not a lot of venomous bites on your adventures in the UK, my Aussie friends! But Alabama rot might be something to put in your differentials.
2) It can be difficult to be part of a different team
The biggest source of friction in UK veterinary teams is usually between overseas vets and UK-trained vet nurses.
This actually has deeply seeded cultural roots and goes well beyond different roles that you are unfamiliar with. But let’s start with the obvious here – you may not be used to work with vet nurses. Therefore, you may not know what you or them should be doing, and so you struggle to delegate tasks. It can also get even more complicated to understand the different roles when you have nurses that are not registered, or nurses that are students, or kennel assistants.
In the UK, vet nurses do a lot, and they expect to be able to do it. Of course, no one likes to be asked to undertake responsibilities they shouldn’t or perform procedures they are not comfortable with, and these little miscommunication events turn the relationships harder.
Except it’s not just that- it’s also the reason why you sometimes feel a bit like and outsider and
why it seems like you’re not able to “get” to the clients, as described in the final challenge below:
3) Culture shock can be quite a shock!
When you spend enough time in a foreign culture, you will start to feel a clash with your own background. You will start to feel uncomfortable and realise that people are different from you.
At first, you will go through a “honeymoon phase”. People seem to be nice, you can buy interesting things, visit very beautiful places and try new food (though I would argue the UK is not the best EU country for that!).
Then you start to try and live a life, and now you don’t know how to find out which bus you need to get, where to find a place to rent or how much you should tip when you ask for the bill. You start to wonder if people at work are talking behind your back or why things feel wrong when you tell them about something they’ve done that you’ve asked them not to do.
You start to get upset by how polite people are and that they perceive you as an outsider because you’re “too direct” with them, even though you need to be or your clients won’t do what you ask them to. Eventually, you start to miss home and your friends and your family and feel a bit frustrated that you don’t seem to be making new friends in the UK. Sometimes you might start to make plans to visit home again, or maybe even decide to go back altogether.
This is cultural shock, and some people struggle with this more than others. For some, the honeymoon phase is long and they don’t actually enter a true phase of cultural shock. For others, the honeymoon phase ends the day they land in the UK. Cultural shock is something most expatriates are not familiar with until they are in the middle of it, and it can have a massive impact on one’s well-being. It’s important that we know we will likely experience it and learn how we can cope with it.
There are many other challenges, but these seem to ring true for the majority of overseas vets. And understanding which hidden challenges you might faces as an international vet will help you to make your transition to the UK a smoother one.
About the Author
 | Andreia Dias is a veterinarian who moved from Portugal to the UK in 2015. In her varied career so far, she’s completed an internship, worked in mixed practice, taken on further studies in feline medicine, and in 2017 she started her own company, UK Vet Move, to help international vets have a smooth transition to working in Britain. |
Further Information
If you’d like to learn more about how to get started as a vet in the UK, head over to the Vet’s Guide to Working in the UK page to get started. You can also find out how to start work as a UK locum, or jump straight to Finding a Job as a Vet in the UK.
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