How one veterinarian found a niche in critical care

Tripp Oliphant, DVM, says experience and repetition played a key role in building his confidence in emergency medicine. In this video, he reflects on his transition into emergency practice and discusses what drew him to critical care, including his interest in stabilizing patients and managing complex ICU cases involving chronic kidney disease, cardiac disease, and respiratory conditions.

Below is the transcript, which has been lightly edited for clarity.

Tripp Oliphant, DVM: Hi, my name is Tripp Oliphant. I'm a small animal veterinarian. I graduated in 2023 and I currently am primarily an urgent care doctor, but I also do emergency medicine. Started in emergency medicine, and now have transitioned, but still love emergency medicine.

dvm360: What types of cases or clinical challenges have captured your interest the most, and what do you think veterinarians should better understand about managing those patients?

Oliphant: I really love critical care. If things are coming in, the crashing and burning patients, they're definitely intimidating, and they can be, especially as a new grad veterinarian. But as you kind of get more comfortable with just dealing with the situation, and you trust your team, then it becomes a little bit okay. I've seen this before, and it's kind of like repetition that you see trends, and you're like, "Okay, I think I can handle this. This looks like a pretty severe GI case, or this looks like an endocrinology case."

One of the things that most interests me is I love stabilizing them, but also long-term ICU management. Our chronic kidney disease cases, or our cardiac cases, respiratory cases, I love—so aspiration pneumonia, doing high-flow nasal cannulas—all of those things really intrigued me. I really loved having access to that when I was in specialty ER, and so I kind of found a niche or an interest in that whenever I was there, and really do enjoy that aspect of it.