The popular ‘Day in the Life of’ sessions are returning for 2025 at BSAVA Congress and Expo! Designed to give you an immersive experience, this year focuses on the importance of the whole team approach with two sessions on emergency and critical care, and anaesthesia. Played out by actors and featuring panel discussions and audience participation, these sessions are set to be informative and truly engaging.

This session starts off with the owner waking up after having a party the day before, noticing that their cat is urinating on a cushion which is blood stained. The owner uses an AI chat bot to try and find out what could be wrong with their cat, and AI tells her it’s an emergency, so she phones the practice to book an appointment. 

The receptionist doesn’t handle the situation very well, and doesn’t book the owner in properly, already leaving the cat at a disadvantage. Here we’ll take a deep dive into what went wrong with the receptionist, focusing on the importance of using the whole team when it comes to appointments.  

Moving on, the session will discuss how we would access and treat the blocked cat, with the nurse’s role heavily featured. We will also look at handling difficult conversations with the client in several areas, such as tackling the challenges of using modern technology, the discussion of euthanasia, as well as veterinary costs. The session will then conclude with a discussion on how to prevent these scenarios from happening again.

This ‘Day in the Life of’ really encompasses the whole team in managing and treating these patients, focusing on a holistic and contextualised care approach, and staying true to what’s happening in practice today.

It’s the start of the day, and the practice team are prepping for the day ahead. A rabbit comes in with a foreign body removal needed. One of the nurse’s goes to get everything ready for the procedure and to do the pre-anaesthetic checks. 

The session looks at the nurse feeling anxious about the rabbit anaesthetic. It’s a new patient, there’s no history for it and there’s a worry that the relevant knowledge for doing the rabbit anaesthetic isn’t there. The discussion will be around safely administering rabbit anaesthetic including post op monitoring. We’ll look at monitoring vital signs, red flags to look out for, and crucially, how to use the whole team in an emergency, and how you might investigate a clinical incident. 

This session will again focus on the whole team approach, how to work together for success and how to support each other in an emergency. 

Our ‘Day in the Life of’ sessions are a one-of-a-kind experience, exclusive to BSAVA Congress and Expo. The actors will really help to bring these scenarios to life, with each session broken down into different lectures and discussions as the scene plays out. You’ll have the opportunity to ask questions, take part in panel discussions, and maybe even get involved in the scene itself! A lot of effort goes into these sessions, and we hope you’ll leave feeling empowered and confident to take on similar challenges in your own practice. 

The ’Day in the Life of’ sessions do fill up quickly, so make sure you head there early to secure your spot, you won’t want to miss these!