"I don't believe that
there is not one vet who uses the dental ultrasonic
machine to scale the dogs' teeth in Myanmar," I said to
my ex-assistant who had worked for me for 3 years as a
Veterinary Technician. He is qualified as a vet in
Myanmar and can open his own practice.
"I have visited the pet shops and veterinary clinics in
May," my assistant said. "Only manual scaling is done,"
he said. Yangon now has over 40 vet clinics like
Singapore and it is a growth city with property prices
shooting up.
As my assistant is a sincere and honest person, I will
not doubt his statement. In this situation, a vet with
an ultrasonic dental scaler will be at a competitive
advantage.
As he said he would be opening his own clinic in Yangon,
I presented him my existing dental scaling machine which
is still operational. I ordered a new one to be
delivered today. He would be at the Airport at 7 am
today as his social visit pass could not be extended.
Finally he has decided to strike out on his own. He had
been offered to join another Myanmar vet to jointly run
a practice. However, nothing materialised since he left
me in April 2011. It had been 5 months and the opening
of this practice might be in December 2011. Something
happened in between. I did advise him to rent a place
and start his own as it is rarely possible for vets or
doctors to work together to start up a practice. There
will be no clients initially and maybe for some time.
So, there may be financial issues as well.
"If you concentrate on doing one thing, you will
succeed," he said to me yesterday when I visited him at
Peninsula Plaza. "You fall down, get up, do again and
again till you succeed." What he meant was "focus" on
veterinary medicine and surgery and not be distracted
and you will succeed in practice. Work long hours too, I
would say as clients want you to be available as this is
a personalised business.
I am most happy for him as he had 3 years of hands-on
experience at Toa Payoh Vets and had been willing to
learn. He had been a good hard working colleague and had
seen most common cases and the emergency anaesthetic
problems.
I know he will do well in Yangon. I know he has a
passion for veterinary medicine because of one incident:
my printer cartridge ran out of ink fast despite my
printer output of less than 50 printed pages per month.
He had been using it to download veterinary info from
the internet when he was working at Toa Payoh Vets.
One year later, I should know how he is doing. I still
can't believe that the most famous and experienced vet
in Yangon does not have an ultrasonic dental scaler. It
is expensive, costing over $3,000 in Singapore. Also,
there is no isoflurane gas + oxygen machine being used
by the vets there. It costs around $5,000 in Singapore
for the basic set. There may be good reasons for not
having such sets in Myanmar.
TOA
PAYOH VETS
