• Question: does your job include any risks?

    Asked by sock532ends25 on 16 Oct 2025. This question was also asked by Zara Hamilton.
    • Photo: Adam Cleaver

      Adam Cleaver answered on 16 Oct 2025:

      Hi. Yes my job involves lots of types of risks. There are several times I have been on a ship that is in the middle of production, there are a lot of health and safety risk involved. the ship is often being welded together and there are a lot of sharp edges. There are also security risks in every aspect of my job. You have to make sure you don’t share sensitive information with the wrong people. There are also financial risks, although I am not quite in the position to be making those decisions, there is always the risk of costing the company money.
      Risk is taken very seriously throughout every process. I’d be happy to explain in more detail if required.

    • Photo: Lindsay Keith

      Lindsay Keith answered on 6 Nov 2025: last edited 6 Nov 2025 12:39

      Good question! Depends what you mean by risks I suppose. My current job is in a biomedical research institute (MRC LMS) and we have laboratories here in which the scientists work. There are all manner of dangerous chemicals that are used in biological research (they may be corrosive, or cancer causing for example), sometimes scientists will use pathogens i.e. micro-organisms that can cause diseases, in the line of work. Viruses, for example can used as a tool to get DNA into cells, and bacteria such as e.coli can be used to produce proteins, but they can also cause disease. This is why scientists take a huge amount of care and use PPE (personal protective equipment) including rubber gloves and white coats to protect themselves. Some scientists may also use radioactivity in their line of work, and that requires additional protective equipment to ensure everyone is safe. Our ace team of 5 health and safety specialists make sure everything is as safe as possible.

Comments

  • Photo: melissau

    melissau commented on :

    Yes, there are physical risks of injury when working as a vet – because our patients are often anxious or may be in pain when we examine them and they can’t tell us how they’re feeling they may resort to letting us know this by biting, scratching, kicking or trying to run away. We can take a certain amount of precautions to avoid getting hurt but this doesn’t get rid of the risk. Cat bites require you to visit a doctor as there’s a high chance of getting a nasty infection or in bad cases needing plastic surgery to repair the wound. Dog bites can do a lot of damage, even from a small dog but especially from a bigger dog. Being kicked by a horse can result in a broken bone or a serious head injury – there are studies which show that being a vet who works with large animals such as horses or farm animals is one of the jobs with the highest risk of ending up in hospital, even when compared with lots of other types of jobs which might be traditionally considered more ‘risky’. As a vet you can also be exposed to infectious diseases which can be transferred from an animal to people. Probably the most well known one is rabies, transmitted by a bite from an infected dog, which is fatal unless you get immediate treatment but there are lots of others which we have to be aware of and make sure we protect ourselves against.