I graduated from vet school in July 2005, making this year my 20th anniversary of being a qualified vet. Many of my classmates are meeting up in Edinburgh this weekend for a big reunion celebration so there have been lots of chats back and forth about where we all are and what we are doing. Some, like me, are practice owners, others are working for governments or in research, and some have left the profession altogether to pursue other interests.

It got me thinking about all the changes that have happened in the veterinary industry over the past 20 years and how that has impacted the animals and their owners.

The first clinic I worked at was in an old police building in Nottingham, England, and we did surgery in what was once the cells.

They had very thick walls and no windows and I often thought about all the people who had passed through these strange rooms before me whilst I was operating.

They had an anaesthetic machine which was run by an unqualified nurse with a stethoscope.

In contrast, now we have fully qualified nurses running the anaesthetic with a stethoscope, ECG machine, blood pressure, pulse ox, a back-up nurse (or two), crash cart and oxygen reserve.

Every change in the animal’s vital signs is instantaneously monitored, which is wonderful for our patient’s health and safety, but does come at an added cost for their owners.

The first two clinics I worked at did not have any way of analysing blood work in-house, meaning we would take blood from the animal and send it off to an external lab to get results.

This process would take several days or even weeks, so we had to have a good idea of what we were testing for, based on reading the animals’ symptoms, and would often start treatment before getting confirmation in the lab results.

This made us very good at reading our patients, using our own senses and really paying attention to what they were telling us.

Now we have such instant test results that it takes the thought and careful patient reading out of it.

Vets tend to run more tests now, as more tests are available to them, and this has a knock-on effect of getting a faster and more accurate diagnosis but also costing the client more money. There is always a ying to the yang.

The level of clinical practice we can achieve today is far higher than when I started out as a vet 20 years ago, but the basics of anatomy, chemistry, physiology, etc, are exactly the same.

The expectations on vets to be all things to all patients — doctor, surgeon, dentist, psychologist, ultrasonographer, radiographer, nutritionist, bereavement counsellor — has increased dramatically.

The need to be perfect and never make any mistakes is a real pressure and unrealistic goal we work with every day as modern vets.

There is a global debate as to whether we are asking too much of general practitioners.

Are we providing too much at too high a cost for the clients? How much is really needed? And just because we can do something doesn’t mean we necessarily should.

I will watch with interest as the veterinary world continues to evolve over the next 20 years and raise a glass to my vicennial classmates this weekend.

• Lucy Richardson graduated from Edinburgh University in 2005. She started CedarTree Vets in August 2012 with her husband, Mark. They live at the practice with their two children, Ray and Stella, and their dog, two cats and two guinea pigs. She is also the FEI national head veterinarian for Bermuda