You always have options!

March 12, 2026

When people ask us why we decided to pursue a career in veterinary medicine, the initial answer tends to be “I love animals and I love being able to help them.” While this is also the case for me, my love for medicine runs a lot deeper than simply wanting to help. Being in and out of the hospital pretty much all my childhood, getting poked with needles and being forced to stay socially distant sometimes for months at a time, learning about mine and other diseases became my survival strategy. Add the fact that animals were my only companions most of the time, and I don’t think it’s hard to understand why my dream to one day become a vet was born very early on.

Bluetongue in the UK: what Ireland needs to know before the virus takes hold

August 10, 2026

A UK farm vet’s frontline account of a bluetongue season gone from mild to devastating – and what it means for vaccination strategy in Ireland this autumn.

From the Vet Space Ireland podcast with Michelle Maguire and Richard Ryan (ArchersField Vets, Kilkenny), in conversation with Jonathan Hobbs, farm vet partner at North Park Veterinary Group, Devon, and Junior Vice President of the Sheep Veterinary Society.

A season that changed everything

When bluetongue virus (BTV) first reached the southeast of England in the autumn of 2023, it looked like a containable, one-off incursion. Midge plumes had blown the virus across the Channel from the Netherlands into Norfolk, Suffolk and Kent, and government surveillance picked up a handful of positive animals. Affected herds were culled, exclusion zones were set up, and the virus did not survive the winter. It seemed, for a moment, like a lucky escape.

It was not. Speaking on the Vet Space Ireland podcast, Jonathan Hobbs, a farm vet partner at North Park Veterinary Group in Devon and Junior Vice President of the Sheep Veterinary Society, walked through how that single incursion has grown into what he now describes as the UK farming equivalent of foot and mouth disease for his generation of vets.

In 2024 the virus arrived earlier in the season, giving it enough time to establish in the native midge population before winter. It spread from the southeast towards the Midlands and along the south coast, and crucially, it overwintered. By 2025, helped by a prolonged heatwave and drought that accelerated both midge activity and viral replication in the insects, bluetongue exploded across sheep and cattle farms in the southwest of England.

“Last year was our warning shot. This year is the Dutch experience we were scared of two years ago, where twenty per cent of the national flock was killed.”
– Jonathan Hobbs

What it looks like on farm

The species picture is stark. Sheep are by far the worst affected, followed by cattle, while goats are almost always asymptomatic and camelids remain at some risk. On the practice’s worst-hit farms this season, up to seventy-five per cent of clinically affected sheep have died, which works out at roughly twenty per cent total flock mortality once morbidity and mortality are combined.

Clinical signs in sheep include painful erosions on the dental pad, cuts and crusting around the mouth and nose, swollen heads, and lameness from coronary band involvement, signs that in previous years might have been mistaken for insect stings or adder bites. Cattle tend to show milder signs, including a reddened or crusty nose, swollen teats, reduced milk yield, and some lameness. Hobbs noted that cattle cases are often overshadowed by the sheer volume of sheep cases coming through the door, even though they are almost certainly under reported.

Sheep: dental pad erosions, mouth ulceration, crusty or swollen nose, swollen heads, coronary band lameness
Cattle: nose reddening or crusting, swollen teats, milk drop, lameness, generally milder disease
Goats: almost always asymptomatic
Camelids: at risk of clinical disease

There is no animal to animal spread. Bluetongue moves exclusively via infected midges, which is a key point of reassurance when ruling out other notifiable diseases, though Hobbs stressed that every suspect case still needs to be tested, both to confirm the strain and to rule out foot and mouth disease on farms where clinical signs could overlap.

Vaccination works, and the economics are stark

Hobbs was unambiguous: the vaccine is highly effective, and the practice’s own numbers back it up. North Park achieved roughly fifteen per cent vaccine uptake among eligible stock last year, against a national average of just five per cent, and farms that vaccinated ahead of last spring avoided the barren rates and dummy calf presentations that hit unvaccinated herds hard at scanning and calving.

Out of around sixty confirmed cases at the practice this season, only one has occurred in a previously vaccinated animal, a dairy cow with a complicating BVD persistently infected animal issue on farm that likely affected her vaccine response. Hobbs was also clear that farmers should not hold back on vaccinating bulls and rams despite cautious vaccine data sheet wording. The testes are an immune privileged site, meaning bluetongue virus can persist and shed in semen for months even after an animal has cleared the virus from its bloodstream, with normal semen morphology and motility masking underlying fertility damage. A short, mild vaccine reaction is a far smaller risk than a week or more of fever and illness, or worse, from natural infection.

“A dead bull is going to give you exactly zero calves. A vaccinated bull who might be off for a day is still going to give you plenty.”
– Jonathan Hobbs

The financial case is equally direct. Using an average lamb value of around one hundred and forty pounds a head, a thousand head flock facing twenty per cent mortality could lose in the region of twenty eight thousand pounds. Vaccinating that same flock costs roughly two and a half thousand pounds. As Hobbs put it, that is cheap insurance against a loss that is now playing out on farms across the south west.

Vaccine supply has struggled to keep pace with the sudden surge in demand this season, with wholesalers issuing stock in unpredictable drops rather than the reliable next day delivery practices are used to. Hobbs’s advice to farmers who have not yet vaccinated is to order early rather than wait, given that the peak bluetongue season typically runs from September through November as viral load builds through the autumn.

Reading the case numbers with caution

One of the most important points Hobbs raised concerns how bluetongue statistics are reported in the UK. Government figures record a “case” as an affected holding, not an affected animal, and testing authorities sample only three animals per holding. A single reported case can therefore represent dozens of dead or affected animals on one farm, while a headline figure of a few hundred cases nationally can understate the true scale of an outbreak considerably.

This matters for how the disease is perceived from a distance. Vets and farmers in areas not yet affected, or in countries like Ireland looking at the UK situation from across the Irish Sea, can easily read modest national case counts and conclude the risk is overstated. Hobbs’s message was the opposite: by the time the numbers look alarming, the disease is already established and difficult to control.

What this means for Ireland

Ireland recorded a small number of bluetongue cases in the latter part of last year, and Hobbs believes that was likely sufficient for the virus to have overwintered here. His reading of the UK’s own trajectory, a quiet first year followed by a far more severe second season once the virus reaches a critical mass in the local midge population, is a direct warning for Irish practices and farmers this autumn and into next spring.

Bluetongue was also compared during the conversation to Schmallenberg virus, which is carried by the same Culicoides midge and is already well established in parts of the southeast of Ireland. Hobbs described bluetongue as essentially “Schmallenberg on steroids”, a useful shorthand for vets explaining the risk to clients who may already be familiar with Schmallenberg’s fertility impacts but have not yet seen a bluetongue case.

His central message for Irish vets and farmers is not to be lulled by a mild season. A low case count this year does not mean the risk has passed, it may simply mean the outbreak has not yet reached the threshold it needs to explode the following spring. Supporting general herd and flock health, including worm control, mineral status and nutrition, also appeared to reduce case severity and improve response to treatment on affected UK farms, alongside vaccination as the primary defence.

Sheep Veterinary Society conference, Kilkenny

Hobbs also used the conversation to flag the Sheep Veterinary Society’s autumn conference, taking place in Kilkenny from Monday the 28th to Wednesday the 30th of September. The Society is a specialist division of the British Veterinary Association, open to international members including vets in Ireland, with annual membership priced at around seventy pounds.

The three-day conference costs under five hundred pounds and includes international speakers on bluetongue alongside Irish parasite specialists, with at least half a day dedicated to vets presenting clinical cases from their own practices. Hobbs, who takes over as Society president at the event, described it as a genuinely clinically focused meeting, with much of the value coming from informal conversation between sessions. For more information go to – sheepvetsoc.org.uk

This article is based on a conversation recorded for the Vet Space Ireland podcast. Listen to the full episode at vetspaceireland.ie.

Article written by Vet Space Ireland

To contribute to the Vet Space Journal, appear on the podcast, or get involved with VSI, contact us at inspire@vetspaceireland.ie or visit vetspaceireland.ie

Vet Space Ireland is a non-profit, volunteer-powered veterinary community platform. Founded 2019.

The deal you’ll only ever do once: selling your veterinary practice

August 4, 2026

A Roberts Advisory series for veterinary practice owners

By Roberts Advisory | 4th August 2026

If you own a veterinary practice, you have spent years, or possibly decades, building something with your name on it. You have carried the late calls, the staffing headaches, the quiet worry about cash flow in a slow month, and the pride of a waiting room full of clients who trust you. And then one day, whether by plan or by a phone call you did not expect, the question arrives: would you ever think about selling?

For almost every owner, selling the practice is a thing they will do exactly once. That single fact sits at the heart of everything we want to share in this series, because it changes the odds in a way most owners only realise afterwards.

A game you’re playing for the first time

Think about what happens when an approach comes in. On one side of the table is you: an excellent clinician and a capable business owner, but someone selling a practice for the first and only time in your life. On the other side is a buyer who may complete a deal like yours every few weeks. They have a team of finance and legal people. They have seen every kind of practice, every set of accounts, every negotiating position. They do this for a living.

It is a little like sitting down to a game of chess having played a few friendly matches, opposite someone who plays at a professional level. You might be sharp, and you might do well. But the person across from you knows the openings, the middle game and the endgame in a way you simply cannot after one sitting. That is not a criticism of you. It is just the reality of experience against inexperience, and it is the single biggest imbalance in any business sale.

Your accountant and solicitor are excellent – and this is a different job

When we make this point, owners often say, reasonably, that they already have a trusted accountant and a good solicitor. So they do, and those relationships matter enormously.

But it is worth being clear about what those advisers do brilliantly, and what sits outside their day-to-day. Your accountant prepares your accounts and manages your tax. Your solicitor handles your conveyancing and your legal affairs. They are very good at those things. Negotiating and controlling the sale of a business against a professional buyer, though, is a different discipline again, and for most general practices it is not something their working week is built around. A sale is a specialist, one-off event, and it rewards those people who do it repeatedly.

There is also a quieter point about objectivity. An adviser who has known you for twenty years, who is a friend as much as a professional, can find it genuinely hard to deliver an uncomfortable message at a tense moment. Sometimes the most valuable thing in a deal is someone whose only job is to look after your side of the table, and who has no hesitation about telling you the hard thing when it needs to be said.

What it means to have someone in your corner

So what does a dedicated adviser actually change? Three things stand out, and none of them is about magic.

The first is simple experience. Someone who has been through many of these processes knows what tends to happen next, where the pressure points are, and what “normal” looks like, so that you are not reading every move as a crisis or a windfall.

The second is that a sale is a project, and it lands on top of a working life you still have to lead. While you are negotiating, you are also running a clinic, seeing patients and managing a team. Requests for information and documents can arrive from every direction and at every hour. Having one person hold all of that, and act as the single point of contact, keeps the process calm and keeps you doing the job you actually trained for.

The third is pace. Time is the quiet enemy of any deal. When a process drifts, energy fades, confidence erodes and good deals can fall apart for no reason other than fatigue. Someone whose job is to keep things moving, steadily and to a plan, protects the outcome as much as any clever negotiating point.

You don’t have to be selling to start thinking

Here is the part we most want owners to hear. None of this is a reason to rush towards the door. Most of the owners we talk to are not selling this year, and many are not selling for several years yet. But the owners who do best are almost always the ones who started thinking early, calmly and on their own terms, rather than the ones who were caught on the back foot by an unexpected approach.

Over the coming articles in this series, we will walk through what that looks like in practice: how to think about timing, how to get your numbers in order, how to make the business less dependent on you, and what a genuinely good outcome involves beyond the headline figure. All of it high level, none of it a hard sell.

Because the goal is not to talk you into anything. It is to make sure that if the day ever comes, you sit down to that one game of your life with someone in your corner who has played it many times before.

Roberts Advisory is Vet Space Ireland’s Horizons Partner and works with veterinary practice owners across Ireland on exit planning, business readiness and the sale of their clinic. We are always happy to talk to owners at any stage, whether a sale is years away or already on the table. Reach out to us at hello@robertsadvisory.ie.

Article written by Roberts Advisory for Vet Space Ireland

To contribute to the Vet Space Journal, appear on the podcast, or get involved with VSI, contact us at inspire@vetspaceireland.ie or visit vetspaceireland.ie

Vet Space Ireland is a non-profit, volunteer-powered veterinary community platform. Founded 2019.

VCI approves new accreditation standards as nurse retention crisis continues

July 30, 2026

New accreditation standards for veterinary education take effect in Ireland this week, against a backdrop of continued Oireachtas scrutiny of veterinary nurse recruitment and retention. Across the Irish Sea, a sharp rise in bluetongue cases is a reminder for vets here to keep pushing vaccination advice, while a fresh BVA intervention on RCVS governance reform echoes debates the VCI itself has faced over its own council structure.

By Vet Space Ireland | 30th July 2026

VCI’s new accreditation standards come into force

The Veterinary Council of Ireland’s newly approved accreditation standards for veterinary medicine and veterinary nursing programmes come into operation on 31 July, applying to all existing and future programmes seeking VCI accreditation. Made under the Council’s statutory remit set out in the Veterinary Practice Act 2005, the standards set contemporary benchmarks across curriculum design, clinical training, facilities, staffing and governance, underpinned by defined “Day One Competencies” for graduates.

VCI president Joe Walsh said the standards reflect both the evolving nature of veterinary practice and the Council’s commitment to ensuring graduates meet the highest standards of animal welfare and public protection. The framework was developed following consultation with higher education institutions and stakeholders across the profession, and is aligned with European and international accreditation frameworks to support the continued recognition and mobility of Irish veterinary graduates.

Oireachtas committee continues to probe veterinary nurse retention

The Joint Committee on Agriculture and Food has continued its engagement on veterinary nurse recruitment and retention, hearing evidence that nearly three-quarters of registered veterinary nurses are considering leaving the profession, unsure about remaining, or planning to leave altogether. The Irish Veterinary Nurses Association has pointed to low pay, burnout and limited career progression as the main drivers, noting an average salary of roughly €36,800 and citing unpaid placement hours as a particular concern.

The VCI has since appeared before the committee, telling members that regulation alone cannot resolve every workforce challenge, while Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine Martin Heydon has said pay and conditions in privately operated practices are a matter for employers and employees rather than government. The exchanges suggest the issue is likely to remain live well into the autumn.

Bluetongue cases climb sharply in England

Defra figures show 54 confirmed bluetongue (BTV-3) cases in England and Wales since the start of the current season on 1 July, with the National Sheep Association reporting 29 positive cases in the last fortnight alone, 15 of them in sheep. The South West, particularly the Exmoor area, has emerged as a hotspot, with officials linking the rise to lower uptake of vaccination this season. Five further cases, in sheep in Devon, were confirmed as recently as 28 July.

Bluetongue is not a UK-only concern. BTV-3 was first confirmed in Ireland in a Co. Wexford suckler herd in January 2026, and DAFM surveillance has since identified cases in at least eight counties, including Wicklow, Laois, Louth, Monaghan, Kildare, Cork and Tipperary. The department has described bluetongue as a disease Ireland will have to learn to live with, following an EU recategorisation that treats it as endemic and under surveillance rather than something to be eradicated. Against that backdrop, the scale of the current English outbreak is a further reminder of the value of continued vigilance and vaccination advice for farmer clients here.

BVA sets out its stall on RCVS governance reform

The British Veterinary Association has published its response to the RCVS’s consultation on governance reform, which closed on 23 July. BVA is calling for reform to be delivered as a single, holistic package rather than piecemeal changes, and wants RCVS Council members, both veterinary and lay, to be appointed through an open, competitive process rather than elected, mirroring governance models used across human healthcare regulation.

The intervention keeps up pressure on a reform process that has been building since Defra’s white paper on replacing the Veterinary Surgeons Act 1966, published earlier this month. For Irish readers, the debate over how a regulator balances elected representation, lay input and independent oversight has clear echoes for the VCI’s own governance, even though its statutory footing and functions differ from those of the RCVS.

References

Veterinary Council of Ireland (30 March 2026), ‘Veterinary Council of Ireland Approves New Accreditation Standards for Veterinary Medicine and Veterinary Nursing Education’: https://cms.vci.ie/veterinary-council-of-ireland-approves-new-accreditation-standards-for-veterinary-medicine-and-veterinary-nursing-education/

Agriland (18 June 2026), ‘Veterinary nurses: “We are facing a retention crisis” : https://www.agriland.ie/farming-news/veterinary-nurses-we-are-facing-a-retention-crisis/

Agriland, ‘Regulation alone cannot resolve every workforce challenge’ – VCI: https://www.agriland.ie/farming-news/regulation-alone-cannot-resolve-every-workforce-challenge-vci/

Houses of the Oireachtas, Committee on Agriculture and Food video archive (15 July 2026 session): https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/oireachtas-tv/video-archive/committees/11989/

Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine, ‘Bluetongue Virus’ (case history for Ireland, first confirmed 24 January 2026, Co. Wexford) https://www.gov.ie/en/department-of-agriculture-food-and-the-marine/publications/bluetongue-virus/

Agriland, ‘Bluetongue “a disease we’re going to have to learn to live with” – DAFM’: https://www.agriland.ie/farming-news/bluetongue-a-disease-were-going-to-have-to-learn-to-live-with-dafm/

GOV.UK, ‘Bluetongue: latest situation’ (Defra/APHA case figures for England and Wales): https://www.gov.uk/guidance/bluetongue

National Sheep Association, ‘2026 bluetongue updates’ (24 July 2026 entry https://nationalsheep.org.uk/2026-bluetongue-updates/

British Veterinary Association, ‘BVA calls for holistic approach to RCVS governance reform in its response to the College’s consultation’: https://www.bva.co.uk/news-and-blog/news-article/bva-calls-for-holistic-approach-to-rcvs-governance-reform-in-its-response-to-the-college-s-consultation/

Article written by Vet Space Ireland

To contribute to the Vet Space Journal, appear on the podcast, or get involved with VSI, contact us at inspire@vetspaceireland.ie or visit vetspaceireland.ie

Vet Space Ireland is a non-profit, volunteer-powered veterinary community platform. Founded 2019.

Unfortunately, my teenage years got the best of me eventually so my grades ended up not being good enough for veterinary school. Like many others, I decided to become a veterinary technician first and go from there. I started working for a mixed animal vet who happened to be an exceptional GP but unfortunately had very little respect for his staff.

I admired his incredible knowledge and skills so much I simply ignored all the red flags for an exceptionally long time. It wasn’t until my equine vet came out to do my horse’s teeth one day that I realized his dismissive comments had gotten to me more than I was willing to admit. The way she interacted with her tech, saying please and thank you, and simply her general attitude towards her almost brought me to tears.

My boss held himself to very high standards so his expectations toward his techs were equally high, despite the fact that we didn’t have vet school and 40+ years of experience under our belts.

I would be lying if I said I don’t like a good challenge and the amount of responsibility he gave me was very flattering but, looking back now I realize there wasn’t a single day I wasn’t absolutely terrified for reasons that should never be an issue. No tech should ever have to be afraid to call their boss during an emergency. He did farm animals and meat hygiene inspections on top of his small animal practice so it was up to us techs to keep the clinic running smoothly and handle every crisis until he returned which is a huge responsibility in even the best of cases. Knowing you were absolutely screwed if you made even the tiniest mistake doing things that were way above your pay grade made matters a thousand times worse.

There were a lot of things that went wrong but what bothered me the most was being pressured into doing things I was morally opposed to. Now add working up to 14 hours a day with zero extra pay to the list and I think it’s easy to understand that I was both physically and emotionally drained.

Then one major traumatic event pushed me over the edge – losing my own dog. Josy meant the world to me. I got her when I was 13 years old, right around the time when my teenage brain started to kick in. She was my only true friend through some very tough times so needless to say, I was devastated when she got sick at only 9 years old. It all happened very fast. She went from drinking more water than usual to being severely anemic and eventually going into multiple organ failure over the course of just a few weeks. I tried everything to save her, took her to several specialists, ran every diagnostic test in the book, gave her multiple blood transfusions and started her on a very expensive immunosuppressive therapy, hoping her body would stop attacking its own cells. All the tests were inconclusive, nobody could tell me what was going on. I was determined to keep trying as long as she was willing to fight but unfortunately that didn’t last very long. The day I knew she’d had enough, my boss was on vacation and my parents were entirely against euthanizing her so I was completely on my own.

I don’t remember how I made it through that day. I do remember getting on a plane the next morning to see the ocean and process what had happened. The plan was to use my vacation days I had left to pull myself together, put my shield back on and get myself ready to head back to work but instead I found myself questioning everything. The rough years at the clinic along with the fact that, despite all the hard work I had put in and the sacrifices I had made, I wasn’t able to save my best friend made me feel like I had lost my love for veterinary medicine altogether.

Despite all the hardships I had endured, I couldn’t see myself not working in a medical field, so I made the decision to leave veterinary medicine behind and pursue a career in nursing instead.

I loved being a nurse. I loved my human patients more than I would have ever imagined possible. I loved the advanced level of care I was able to give and that money was less of an issue. Most importantly though, I loved the way I started to see myself. I realized that after all the years of rigorous training, I was good at my job and ready to take it to the next level.

Working as an RN taught me that finding the right workplace makes all the difference. It also taught me that you are not a bad employee for communicating your concerns and standing up for yourself.

It took leaving the veterinary field for me to realize it was still where my heart was at. I hadn’t lost my love for it, I had merely poured my time and energy into a place that didn’t appreciate me, and I wasn’t gonna let a few years of bad experiences get in the way of what I had always wanted so I applied to vet school again after all and got in.

Just because you are unhappy where you are right now doesn’t mean there isn’t a place in veterinary medicine for you. There are so many options to explore that there really is no reason to stay somewhere you don’t want to be.

Please also know that there is absolutely no shame in leaving the field altogether. Working in veterinary medicine is extremely stressful and demanding in even the best of circumstances so it’s absolutely ok to admit that it isn’t for you after all.

Your physical and mental health are more important than holding onto a dream that no longer serves you.

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Lisa is a 4th year vet student at the University of Veterinary Medicine in Hanover, Germany. Despite growing up around the sunny beaches of the Gold Coast of Florida, her heart will always belong to the vast farmland and wide open spaces of the Midwest. Lisa has a passion for all things farming and medicine. During her time working as an LVT at a small animal clinic and an RN at several different hospitals, she discovered that her main areas of interests are emergency medicine, surgery, and intensive care. Outside of veterinary medicine, Lisa loves to ride horses and travel to visit her family and friends that are spread out all over the world. Having moved continents several times, she doesn’t exactly feel tied to a specific place and she’s excited to find out where life is going to take her next after her graduation.