The Yorkshire Vet, Julian Norton finds "beauty in brevity" when it comes to veterinary notes

My column, in Country Week, comes in at almost exactly 630 words. Occasionally, it is a stretch to spin out the weekly veterinary anecdotes to fill the space, but more often, the opposite is the case and I need the same discipline to cut out unnecessary words and keep it succinct.

Anne is helpful in this regard. She’s even better at removing unnecessary punctuation.

Like Ian, who is a true raconteur, I try to follow the general rule that excessive words are annoying and superfluous.

A quick look at my clinical veterinary notes over the years will confirm this. The phrase, often added to my clinical notes for a puppy having its first vaccination, simply states ‘fit and well’.

This doesn’t mean, I hasten to add, that the examination and the check over was brief – usually quite the opposite in fact. Of course, where proper information is required, clinical notes must be more detailed. I’ll describe the shape, position and appearance of any abnormality, along with the various differential diagnoses and plans for tests and investigations.

My economy with words started at the outset of my veterinary career. In the olden days, soon after I first started in practice, clinical notes were written by hand on stiff postcards. The date went in the left margin, the notes in the middle and the price on the right-hand side.

There was a general acceptance words should be kept to a minimum. This was partly to save time but also to save space in the filing cabinet. The general health of any patient could be easily assessed by the thickness of the notes rather than a radiograph.

With increasingly detailed notes and an ever-expanding client base, the cabinets bulged to the point where the doors didn’t shut.

Back then, a cat, bitten on the tail by a neighbouring tom and suffering from pyrexia and pain, would simply have this jotted on his notes: CBA, inj BLA. The position of the CBA was sometimes recorded, but not always.

‘CBA’ means ‘Cat Bite Abscess’. The next bit referred to the injection of antibiotic. We all knew what and how much to inject into a C with an A to make it better – the BLA bit – it was a code between vets to save words. Abbreviations were everywhere: ROS (removal of sutures), EAGs (empty anal glands).

RFM would often appear in the day book, where there was a similar requirement to save space and to be succinct. It means ‘retained foetal membranes’ and pertains to a recently calved cow with the nasty, smelly and fetid remains of a placenta hanging from her back end.

Nowadays, computers have taken over the role of the postcard, a biro and filing cabinet. It is simple to make detailed notes and there are usually radiographs and lab results included too.

To peruse a patient’s clinical record now is sometimes like flicking through an encyclopaedia, with graphs of the dog’s weight and reports attached in abundance.

The clinical records are undeniably more detailed, and easier to read, but occasionally, when a poorly cat has been in a fight, I’m still tempted to simply write CBA; inj BLA.

Sometimes there is beauty in brevity.

The Yorkshire Vet continues on Channel 5 on Tuesday at 8pm.