An interview with Stacey Newton on just getting on with it.
by Fiona Farmer BVSc MRCVS
There are no frills attached with Stacey Newton. She’s practical, down to earth and insanely talented. As an equine vet and horse lover myself, I was really looking forward to my conversation with Stacey. I can recall a depressing stat I heard a while ago stating only around one per cent of final year students want to go into equine practice, so I am thrilled to be able to share Stacey’s remarkable career story, and while she may not still be working in practice now it showcases how much potential there is in an equine based role.
“My family moved from the States to the UK when I was seven. My dad was in the Air Force and was given the option to work in the UK or go to Saudi Arabia. My mum didn’t want us going to Saudi and so we ended up in the UK in Yorkshire.” There is no hint of an American accent, but a proud Yorkshire one shines through. “Mother always wanted horses, and eventually, after about five years or so after staying in hotels and various places, we got a farm with stables and land and so we got horses!”
The ‘various places’ she mentioned was in fact a house in The Studley Royal Park. “Because mother had a job at the base teaching the American students and my dad got our stay extended, we were able to stay in the UK. Initially we lived in a hotel before we moved to The Studley Royal Park, which is part of Fountains Abbey. It’s now owned by the National Trust. It was owned by the County Council then and we had this massive house that had no central heating. Each room had its own separate fire in, it was absolutely massive, and you basically froze to death in the winter. And we used to get proper winters with snow – we came from California where there was no snow! We became friends with a neighbour who ran a small mixed farm with sheep. We met them through going to school with their children. My parents would volunteer me and my siblings to help with things like potato picking, potato seeding and lambing. Stone picking was also another fun job! It was freezing and hard work but yeah, that’s what we did and that’s when I started riding horses.”
The passion was a slow burner for Stacey, “Initially I was not that bothered, but I ended up going to Pony Club and competitions. I liked dressage a lot, a bit of eventing, although our horses were terrible at jumping, and some long-distance riding too.”
It was through her equestrian antics that Stacey realised she wanted to be a vet. Having spent time with some local equine vets, she realised she had an interest in medicine and surgery and was not put off by discouraging teachers. “At school they told me it would be too hard to get into vet school and I’d have very little chance of getting a place. So, I just thought, ‘Right that’s it, that’s what I’m going to do!’ so that’s what I ended up doing!”
And that is what she did. It seems impossible that anybody would think the bright, hardworking, rural girl wouldn’t make a great vet. And so, Stacey went to Bristol and loved it, qualifying in 1993. “We’ve just had our 31-year reunion, because nobody turned up last year” she laughed.
“I always wanted to go into equine practice” she explains, “but when I first graduated, I locumed for six months, which was a bit daunting, although I was lucky as I’d found a great practice while at university and they had let me do loads of stuff while I was a student. I was performing surgeries when I was in second year, so I was relatively confident.” Utterly unfazed, Stacey just gets on and does things.
“In that first locum job I was there to replace the vet, so I had to do the consults, run the surgery and do evening consults. Back then you didn’t always have a nurse to do anaesthesia, so I was having to monitor the anaesthesia and do the surgery and tell the nurse what to do. And if you went out on a call where you might need a hand with something, you didn’t have help, you just went to it by yourself. They don’t do that anymore.”
“I did that for six months and then I got a full-time job in a mixed practice, with a large equine component to it. They had two partners; one did the equine, and one did the small animal. And I was split between the two.”
She explains the challenges of being a young female vet in a mixed role, how clients would always want to see her male boss or how if she had a male vet student, clients would automatically direct their questions to the student and not to her. “It was really odd,” she muses “I’d be wearing all the typical vet gear, but they would address the male student, not me.”
It never knocked her confidence, and she took from that role all that she needed. “I stayed for about a year but by then, because I’d already done so much as a student, I felt like I had already been and done it, so I wanted to go and do something different. I wanted to do further learning and more equine specific.”
Stacey went on to do a residency in Internal Medicine at Leahurst, Liverpool. “It was great; really, really busy.” Clearly not shy of hard work, the old “American” format of being on duty for six days and nights straight offered opportunities for Stacey to be involved in departments beyond just internal medicine. “You would do surgery, repro and orthopaedics too. There were no interns when I did it, only residents, so even though I was the medicine resident, I’d be expected to get involved which whichever case appeared.”
As a Liverpool graduate myself, we got lost in a happy ten minutes reminiscing about the individualities and quirks of our old professors. “Derek didn’t like surgery, so I got to do loads on his nights. Barry was so quick, and Chris was new then, and wanted to do lots of surgery, so if I wanted to do any, I’d have to scrub in really quickly and make a start,” she laughs.
“Yeah, I have a lot of happy memories and I remember a lot of times when I used to see the sun coming up through the windows and we’d still be on the operating table.”
On completion of her residency, Stacey went on to undertake her PhD. “I just wanted to be more knowledgeable in equine medicine and was determining whether that involved going back into practice or not. Then the opportunity of the PhD arose, looking into headshaking in horses. It was really interesting, and I spent a bit of time with a surgeon that dealt with human cranial nerve problems too.”
When recounting applying for her grant for her PhD, Stacey remembers being surprised that she was awarded it and the haphazard way her PhD was structured. “When most people do their PhDs, it’s all planned out and suggested, whereas my supervisor just let me choose a topic but there was no plan!” She laughs, “I had to sort it all out from scratch, which I wasn’t used to doing, and work out how I was going to do it, as there was a lot of lab work.”
It was this lab work which became the pathway for Stacey to move into pathology. “I learned a lot about the lab, it was all very hands on and no one to help me.” The newfound freedom of being a PhD student, along with the new friends from the lab, had set her life in a new direction.
“Doing a PhD is not nine-to-five, you can do your work whenever you want. So, it was probably one of the times when I actually managed to go out and socialise a bit more and get to know other people, which was great. I met a good, interesting group of people. I was doing a lot of stuff with histology and microscopy, and I got quite friendly with the group that were doing all the electron microscopy stuff, so I got into doing that too, which was really interesting.”
Alongside her studies, Stacey became an avid rower. “I moved to Chester and took up rowing. I’d never rowed in my entire life, and I loved it – I got into the elite team, and we went to Henley.” Oh, to be an overachiever.
As her PhD came to an end, once more Stacey found herself wondering what to do next. A young mum herself at this time, her son being just four months old, NationWide Laboratories needed a maternity replacement and Stacey went for it.
“I had to re-learn a lot of the small animal stuff, but I like learning. I guess I was sort of thrown into the deep end with it. These days there are training programmes for pathologists, but I just did a lot of studying!”
Stacey was travelling between the Northwest at the lab, and her beloved Yorkshire. Long before working from home was a thing, Stacey pushed for it. “They didn’t think it would work, and unbeknownst to me, they were monitoring me and my output to begin with, but they stopped when they realised, I was getting more work done from home than being in the lab!”
I commented on her work ethic. It has shone through, from a potato picking child in snowy winters, a sole charge locum straight out of vet school, a hardworking resident, a self-planned PhD student and now to a clinical pathologist. “I don’t know, I’ve always been like that, just sort of self-motivated. I don’t need anybody to sit there and say, ‘Look, you’ve got to do this’.”
Stacey initially gained a diploma in pathology, but after 2008 the Royal College announced they would be removing diplomas and pathologists had to re-sit part 2 for the FRCPath. “There were pathologists who had been around for years who all had to re-take the exam!”
As someone who has always finished one thing and gone on to push herself higher and harder for the next, I was curious as to her role at NationWide Laboratories and how she had stayed there for so long.
“I’ve just moved up in experience really. I’m now the head clinical pathologist and my role is partly managerial.” There is no ego at all in this exceptional woman. “I do the same work as everybody else basically. I do clinical pathology, which includes haematology, biochemistry, endocrinology and lots of cytology. We’ve got the digital scanner now, which is good, and we have a huge microbiology department, so we do quite a lot of microbiology as well.”
We talked a bit about the merits of pathologists spending time in practice before moving into pathology, and Stacey strongly agrees that time in practice is essential to being a great pathologist. “I think being in practice helps you know exactly what the end point’s going to be. As you’ve been there and done that, you know exactly where the clinicians are sitting. You know exactly what they’re experiencing. You know that they’re really busy and you know what they want from a lab. Being in practice helps you to know exactly how everything fits in. You can’t just sit there at the end of the phone and say, ‘Well, this test is positive, it needs to fit with the presentation’. And unless you’ve been in practice, you’re not going to know what’s going on.”
Stacey is very proud of her work at NationWide Laboratories, particularly the way she will always try to get to the bottom of a case. “You have to remember that at the end point is an animal that’s come in for a reason, these aren’t just tests that you just throw out. There is a reason for doing them and there is an animal that you’re trying to help.”
As well as amassing huge amounts of knowledge, Stacey is passionate about sharing what she has learnt, coaching trainee pathologists and preparing and presenting webinars. “You need people to follow on from what you have done. When I was a kid, I thought that finishing school meant finishing learning, but we should all always be learning. We work very well as a team here and if somebody finds out something new, we always share it.”
She has gone a long way from the young vet in mixed practice. I wondered if horses, the animals that set her on the road into veterinary, still played a large part in her life. “I don’t have a horse anymore, but my mother still has her old horse and I live quite close by.”
So, without horses, and exams, what does Stacey do now in her free time? “I do a lot of gardening; my garden, my mother’s garden – she’s got a huge, big garden and woodland. I go and help in my spare time but yeah, I don’t do much else apart from gardening and running.”
The casual addition of running is indeed quite phenomenal. When pressed she admits to having run two marathons and some half marathons at incredible speed, completing Nottingham marathon in 3 hours and 20 minutes. This gave her a “good for age” entry into London where she went on to finish in a rapid 3 hours 30 minutes!
“I just run really; it helps me relax. I did the Great North Run; the half marathon is much more my distance. The whole marathon is a bit too long.”
I shouldn’t have been surprised really, just as she had slipped in becoming an elite rower in her downtime during her PhD. Stacey is one of those people that is just brilliant at everything she turns her hand to but thinks nothing of it.
She is a proud mother to two grown children, her son just having graduated and her daughter about to leave for university. “They are both artistic, my son is more design oriented and has just graduated from his engineering degree. I like to spend time with my daughter at the weekends. We are out of the tough teenage years now!”
I asked Stacey to think back to a younger version of herself. What advice would she give I wonder? “I really don’t think I would want to have done anything differently to be honest,” she says. And why would she? She has always just done her best, and her best has always been outstanding. She’s never been fazed by things, always taken opportunities, always worked hard. She has created a loving home, exactly where she wanted to be, and has paved the way for others to follow in her footsteps.
NationWide Laboratories is committed to making a positive impact on animal health by offering innovative products, technology and laboratory services to your veterinary practice. They have been providing a comprehensive range of veterinary diagnostic services since 1983. Their expert teams can assist you in making decisions on relevant testing for companion, exotic and farm animals. They offer full interpretation in a range of testing areas including biochemistry, haematology, cytology, histopathology, endocrinology, microbiology, etc. Their sample collection service is powered by National Veterinary Services.
Email: info@nwlabs.co.uk
Website: https://www.nwlabs.co.uk/
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