Veterinary Nurse

We’re a privately owned small animal hospital in Sydney’s Inner West, and we’ve been under the same ownership for fourteen years. Around twenty staff, six vets, no corporate parent, and no plans to acquire one.

We’re housed in a 1920s Commonwealth Bank. The old vault is now our radiology room, which has yet to stop being funny.

The role

Full time preferred. Three days a week or more will absolutely be considered.

You’d be rotating through surgery, hospital and our shelter work: admissions and discharges, anaesthesia, catheters, bloods, medications, dentals, nursing hospitalised patients, and talking with clients about their animals. Real nursing, in other words.

Hours and pay, up front

• Open Tuesday to Saturday, closed Sunday and Monday

• Nurses work four long days, roughly 7:30am to 5:30pm, then have three consecutive days off

• No rostered weekends. Occasional Saturday cover is genuinely rare, and it’s paid at time and a half

• We close at 5pm on weekdays

• Above award and commensurate with experience, reviewed regularly

• Trial days are paid

What we’re looking for

Two things sit at the top of the list, and they’re the same two whether you’re a kennel hand, a receptionist, a nurse or a vet: a solid work ethic, and genuinely caring about the animals in front of you.

Cert IV is desirable. It is not essential. Some of the best nurses we’ve worked with never quite finished theirs — they found a clinic they loved, deferred, and never got back to it. If you’re qualified, brilliant. If you’re part-way through, or haven’t started, please apply anyway.

We would much rather teach a good person how to place a catheter than try to teach a qualification how to care.

The rest is teachable. Recording an anaesthetic properly, spiking a bag with potassium, getting a millilitre of adrenaline out of one of those infuriating little glass ampoules. If you already can, wonderful. If you can’t yet, that’s what we’re here for.

What makes the caseload worth turning up for

We are the veterinarians for the Cat Protection Society of NSW — an association going back more than sixty years, and one that means proper shelter medicine running alongside private practice. Enormous surgical exposure. An unreasonable number of kittens.

In 2020 we became the first practice in Australia to treat FIP legally and successfully. Referral hospitals used to send us those cases; these days they treat them the way we do. We also see a lot of greyhounds, and have a particular soft spot for Australian Shepherds.

The equipment

Two surgical suites with dedicated prep and a wet table. Five anaesthetic machines, each with a Darvall multiparameter monitor, which means ETCO2 on every anaesthetic, every time. Two IM3 dental machines and two IM3 dental x-ray units. DR digital radiography. Ultrasound. Tonometry. A full IDEXX in-house laboratory. Transfusion equipment. A LigaSure, which we are still slightly giddy about.

And every scrap of bubble wrap that comes through the door, hoarded and wrapped around the legs of anaesthetised patients, because cold patients are a choice and we’d rather not make it.

Why this job is available

One of our nurses, and one of the very best we’ve had, is moving on. We’re not going to dress that up as growth. We’re sorry to see them go, and now there’s a gap in a very good team.

To apply

Send a resume and an introduction letter to [email protected], attention Dr David Hughes and Dr Rebecca Brady. Tell us where you’re up to, what you can already do, what you can’t do yet, and when you could start.

You’ll need Australian citizenship, permanent residency, or a visa with the right to work.