97 | How to actually do more with your patients as a veterinary nurse in 2026
This episode gives you the action steps you need to take, as a veterinary nurse, to start doing more with your patients and using more of your skills.
Because while it’s one thing to talk about what needs to change, it’s another to talk about what you can actually do, on shift, with your patients.
So this episode is called How to Actually Do More With Your Medical Patients in 2026 - because we should all be doing more with our medical (and non-medical!) patients.
But I want to be really clear about something from the start.
This is not an episode about minor surgery, stitch ups, lump removals, or trying to prove that nurses can do the same practical things as vets.
Now don’t get me wrong, those skills absolutely have their place, but if ‘doing more’ only ever means Schedule 3, we are missing the point, and massively underselling ourselves - because in reality we can do so much more.
So today I want to talk about the ways every single veterinary nurse can do more with their medical inpatients, regardless of where you work, your job title, whether you’re qualified or not, or how long you’ve been qualified.
My goal is that you’ll leave this episode with a renewed sense of what ‘doing more’ CAN look like, and how to start making that happen in practice.
What does ‘doing more’ as a veterinary nurse actually look like?
I want to start with something really important - reframing what ‘doing more’ as a veterinary nurse actually means.
Because I think this gets confused a lot - and let me tell you, my facebook comment section recently has shown that. Lots of people think that by ‘doing more’, veterinary nurses want to start:
Doing the vet’s job.
Diagnosing.
Prescribing.
Or generally just being the loudest voice in the room.
But in reality we couldn’t want anything further than that. And that’s not what ‘doing more’ is. Instead, we want to use more of our nursing skills to think clinically, anticipate problems before they arise, spot changes early, truly advocate for our patients, and translate diseases and physiology into nursing care.
But the biggest issue I find with that is this: a lot of nurses have been taught, either implicitly or explicitly, that their value lies in the tasks they get to perform. Like if it’s not visible, measurable, or hands-on, it somehow counts less.
And that mindset is holding us back, because medical nursing isn’t task-dense (though there are lots of practical skills we get to use, too!) - it’s decision-dense. It’s about us getting to use our brains, as well as our practical skills, to give better care.
And that brings me to the framework I use constantly - in practice, in teaching, and in pretty much every case I think about.
Ask yourself this one question: ‘How does my patient feel?’
The question I come back to again and again is this: ‘How does this patient feel?’
Not ‘what’s the diagnosis’, or ‘what does the textbook say’.
Instead, I want to know what that disease is DOING to my patient, what the blood results are telling me about their situation right now, and what their clinical signs are showing us.
Because once we understand how our patients feel, nursing care becomes obvious.
You don’t need to know the ins and outs of every disease process.
We just need to understand if their condition is causing pain, nausea, anorexia, weakness, stress, fear, changes to their vital signs, etc.
And then we need to ask ourselves ‘What would make this patient feel better?’
This is the ONE thing I want you to take into 2026 - you don’t need to know it all. You just need to be able to ask yourself the right questions, and trust that you know how to turn that into nursing care.
I also want to give you a few key nursing skill sets to put into practice this year.
They’re not big or flashy, but they’re vital ways we can make a real difference to our patients - using both our clinical knowledge and decision-making skills, and our practical skills too.
One: Prioritise nursing assessments, not just ‘monitoring’ your patients.
Let’s talk about assessment and monitoring - because while we often use those terms interchangeably, there’s a difference between them.
Monitoring is collecting data - but ASSESSMENT is interpreting it.
As veterinary nurses, we are perfectly placed to notice things like trends, subtle signs of deterioration, inconsistencies and early warning signs. We are the ones in the wards with these patients each day, so if anyone is going to spot these first, it’s likely to be us.
Every inpatient you look after should prompt three questions.
What is this patient trying to tell me?
What could change or go wrong next?
What might they need before that happens?
That might look like noticing changes in respiratory effort, SpO2 or CO2 in a patient on oxygen, prompting us to change their oxygen supplementation.
It might look like picking up pain when it’s being masked as the patient just being a bit quiet or lethargic.
It might look like spotting weight gain and flagging early signs of fluid overload to the vet in an at-risk patient.
Or it might look like realising your patient hasn’t met their calorie needs for days.
None of this requires you to use practical schedule 3 skills, but all of it IS nursing. It doesn’t need the vet to delegate procedures to you - it needs you to be confident in your observations, and not be afraid to speak up.
Two: Foundational care IS clinical care - even if it doesn’t look flashy.
The next skill set is one we’re often quick to dismiss (yep, even us nurses) because it’s often the stuff we just do without thinking.
And that’s the quote-on-quote ‘unsexy’ stuff.
Things like cleaning patients, grooming them, adjusting their bedding/kennel environment, creating nursing plans that meet behavioural needs, and reducing stress.
This often gets labelled as ‘just TLC’ and honestly, that phrase has done us a disservice. Bcause it isn’t ‘fluffy’ or just about kindness - this nursing care is still clinical, and it makes an ENORMOUS difference.
A patient who is cold, soiled, anxious, unsettled or uncomfortable won’t heal well. They won’t eat, they won’t move around normally, and they won’t get out of the hospital as quickly.
Stress affects things like GI motility, cardiovascular stability, glucose regulation, immune function and pain perception (amongst other things) - so when we make our patients comfortable, happy, settled, clean and ensure they receive tailored care, we’re directly impacting their recovery.
If someone dismisses this as ‘not important’ or ‘not real nursing’, that tells me they don’t understand how our bodies, and our patients, work. This IS nursing, and it DOES make a difference.
Three: Nutrition - the most powerful area nurses can take the lead on.
Unsurprisingly (given how much I bang on about it), nutrition is - in my opinion - one of the most important areas for us to take the lead on as veterinary nurses.
Every vet nurse should feel confident calculating their patient’s energy requirements, assessing if they’re meeting it, and if not, flagging this with the vet and asking what the plan is (or better yet, suggesting a plan themselves).
Nutrition is not ‘let’s see if they eat in the next few days’ or ‘they’ve eaten a little bit so its fine’. It’s assessing our patients, quantifying their intake and needs, and pushing for interventions to help them meet their energy requirements.
We wouldn’t just leave a dehydrated patient to figure out their fluid balance by themselves - it’s no different with a malnourished patient and their nutrition. And when we’re allowed to take the lead on this (under direction, of course), patient outcomes improve.
Four: Fluid therapy - thinking about fluids, not just hanging bags.
Fluid therapy is another area where nursing input is often underestimated. Often we’re handed a bag, told a rate, and directed to hang the fluids - and whilst hanging fluids is a task, managing fluid therapy is a skill (and an important skill for us as nurses and technicians).
Whilst we’re not prescribing the fluids, and we’re administering them under veterinary direction, we ARE caring for the patient receiving them. And this means we need to understand a few things.
First, we need to know why this patient is on fluids.
We need to know what those fluids are trying to achieve.
And we need to know how to spot if they’re receiving too much or not enough.
Watching things like weight, respiratory rate and effort, lung sounds, POCUS changes (yes, we can do that too!), hydration and perfusion signs, and flagging concerns early, is a VITAL part of managing fluid therapy for veterinary nurses.
Fluid therapy is dynamic and patient needs are ever changing - and this means our nursing care needs to be, too.
Five: Communicating and advocating for your patients in a way that REALLY works.
Speaking up about patient concerns doesn’t mean you need to perfectly understand their disease. It just means you need to trust in your nursing brain and gut instinct, and pay attention to the patterns you’ve observed whilst nursing your patient.
Instead of:
‘I’m probably wrong, but…’
Try:
‘I’ve noticed a change over the last few hours and I’m concerned because…’
Make sure you focus your concerns on trends, changes in patient status/data/vitals over time, or patient behaviour.
When you advocate for your patients or communicate concerns, you’re not challenging authority (though over the years we have definitely been made to feel this way!) - instead, you’re contributing your clinical opinion and helping your colleagues, and they should be grateful for that information. If they’re not, (and I say this with all the love in the world…) that says more about them than it does you.
Let me give you a real example of what this looks like in practice.
We had a patient with a history of pseudo-Addison’s and ongoing GI signs, who needed a general anaesthetic for a GI endoscopy.
On paper, a fairly routine procedure - and whilst the GA was a little riskier for this specific patient, we carefully investigated and ran pre-GA bloods which were fine, before proceeding.
But under GA, the patient became significantly cardiovascularly unstable.
We pulled bloods. And instead of just running the sample and handing the vet the results, I interpreted them through a nursing lens.
I asked myself, what are these results telling us about the patient’s current clinical signs and anaesthetic complications? And what stabilisation will this patient likely need?
Based on that, I was able to anticipate the emergency treatments the patient was likely to need. So while the vet was assessing and making decisions, I was gathering treatments they might need in an emergency, preparing equipment, and thinking two steps ahead.
Not diagnosing, not prescribing, and not working outside of my legal remit as a veterinary nurse. But supporting faster, safer clinical decision-making, meaning the patient received emergency treatment more quickly.
Often the biggest impact vet nurses have isn’t in what we practically do with our patients - it’s in what we anticipate.
So as you head into 2026, I want you to stop asking ‘what am I allowed to do?’
Instead, start asking yourself ‘how does this patient feel, and what could I do to improve that?’
You don’t need a new job title, or permission, or to shout louder. You just need to start viewing and using your skills differently.
You can start today by truly assessing a patient, rather than ‘just’ monitoring their vitals. Or by advocating for one small change in care.
Medical nursing isn’t about doing more stuff, or performing more tasks. It’s about doing the right things, intentionally.
So let this be the year you stop underestimating your impact - because I promise you, it’ll be good for you, and even better for your patients.
Did you enjoy this episode? If so, I’d love to hear what you think. Take a screenshot and tag me on Instagram (@vetinternalmedicinenursing) so I can give you a shout-out and share it with a colleague who’d find it helpful!
Thanks for learning with me this week, and I’ll see you next time!
