With her passion and experience drawn from nearly 30 years as a veterinary nurse, Emma Eve-Raw takes huge pride in seeing the next generation develop thriving careers.
Emma, who is Head of Centre at Goddard Veterinary Nursing College on the East London and Essex border – one of VetPartners’ three nurse training colleges – has more than quadrupled the number of students coming through its doors.
Here, as we mark Veterinary Nurse Awareness Month throughout May, Emma shares how she is inspiring the next generation of vet nurses and animal care assistants.
Emma Eve-Raw’s mission is to provide her students with the best possible learning environment and the support they need to make their learning journey enjoyable and successful.
Emma strives to ensure every student is given the best chance to learn and succeed, regardless of any challenges they may face and, working with her supportive team at Goddard Veterinary Nursing College, has designed teaching programmes and student support services to help bring out the best in everyone. Rather than rigid classroom sessions, students can take advantage of hybrid and flexible learning and follow lessons online, while teaching is tailored to how individuals learn and absorbs information.
As well as helping trainees thrive, under Emma’s leadership student numbers have grown significantly from 28 to over 120 across the Diploma in Veterinary Nursing and Veterinary Care Support Certificate courses. This increase has been partly due to Emma’s ethos that everyone can achieve their goals if they are given the right opportunities and support and the college now invites applications from students who don’t already work in practice.
Emma said: “We accept students who have come from other careers or who couldn’t previously work in the veterinary industry because they didn’t have the right qualifications. It enables us to recognise other transferrable skills people have and bring them on as true apprentices. I’ve been able to adapt and change my career after being in the same environment for such a long time, and I feel it’s important others can do the same.
“We’ve also increased student numbers – while maintaining small cohort sizes – by opening our doors to students from practices outside the Goddard group. I felt this was important because bringing people together from different working environments creates a more rounded cohort and gives students a more balanced education.”
Changing career goals
Emma says her philosophy for educating students is based on what she’s learned through her career in veterinary practice, and during a short spell as a manager within the NHS, but she has also been influenced by a personal experience that derailed her own career plans.
Emma’s heart was set on being a vet and she was so committed to her goal that she worked in a practice every day after school. But when she was 16 years old, a 25kg dumbbell fell on her left ankle, causing an injury so severe she was in a wheelchair for four months and on crutches for three years.
Unable to do her A-levels in the expected time frame, Emma felt she had to turn her back on training to be a vet.
As one door closed another opened, and Emma was offered a job as a trainee nurse at the practice where she’d been gaining work experience, and she went on to qualify as an RVN – doing all her training on crutches and taking her practical exams around the time she underwent joint fusion surgery on her ankle.
Although veterinary nursing wasn’t her first choice of profession, she says it has opened a world of opportunities for her since she qualified in 1999 and Emma has gone on to celebrate many significant career achievements.
After progressing to head nurse and practice manager roles and boosting her knowledge with additional studies, Emma is now drawing on her passion for the profession to inspire the RVNs and VNAs of the future at Goddard’s Veterinary Nursing College.
Emma says while she couldn’t follow her initial career dream, she has enjoyed every minute of working in veterinary nursing.
She said: “I couldn’t be a vet but as a nurse I was still able to care for animals, and I could still push myself to achieve career goals. I’ve taken every opportunity I’ve been given, which has led to new and exciting challenges. When I was working as a head nurse, I was given the chance to become company secretary, which taught me new skills that led to becoming practice manager. I thrived in that position and helped to significantly grow the business.
“My nursing experience was so influential in achieving this because I helped introduce several nurse clinics on a wide range of topics. They were very successful in attracting and keeping clients and they also embraced the skills and expertise of our nursing team, which in turn gave them greater job satisfaction and pride in their work.”
A love for learning
Emma enjoyed sharing her knowledge through being a clinical supervisor and took an 18-month sabbatical from her practice manager job to work at the College of Animal Welfare. She then returned to practice to focus on her own skills, qualifying as an SQP and taking clinical qualifications but felt that education was calling her.
Her CV was further boosted with a post-graduate degree in education and positions at Middlesex University and City & Islington College, but she didn’t want to give up clinical work and alongside teaching worked night shifts delivering critical and emergency care at Goddard Veterinary Group’s Wanstead Veterinary Hospital.
This set Emma on a path to being offered the position of heading up the nursing college – but not before she took time to work in the NHS as a clinical lead with Test & Trace during Covid and completed a Master’s Degree in Public Health with an extra year of studies focusing on education in antibiotic stewardship and antimicrobial resistance, across One Health.
Emma, who is kept busy outside of work as a mum of three, a school governor and platform diving coach, also aims to give the same level of dedicated learning support to colleagues working at Goddard Veterinary Group, through her role as Training Manager, so they can develop their skills and remain engaged in their roles.
Having fulfilled team members who enjoy coming to work is just as important to Emma as having a happy student cohort and she enjoys helping the college’s educators thrive by looking for opportunities to develop their roles and give them more responsibility.
She said: “I want my team to love their jobs and feel as passionate about what they do as I do. Like students, tutors have the opportunity to enjoy hybrid and flexible working because I want them to have a positive work life balance and be able to pick children up from school, attend assemblies or go to sports days – things I’ve missed out on in previous roles.”
While flexibility is key on most levels, one thing Emma is fixed on is that senior teaching team members must do five days in a clinical setting each year, so their practical knowledge is kept up to date. She said: “For me, it’s vital we keep in touch with clinical practice so we resonate with students and can understand the challenges they may face.”
Emma believes with the support offered by Goddard Veterinary Group and VetPartners, veterinary nurses can thrive and develop rewarding careers.
She added: “My aim is that we give our students the best training possible so they can offer an exceptional standard of patient care when they are working in practice. But we also want to give them the best chance of reaching their full potential and feeling that they can aim high and achieve their goals, because veterinary nursing is such a rewarding career and it can open doors if you want it to.”
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