Hello and welcome back to the Small Animal Clinical podcast brought to you from the Royal Veterinary College in London.

My name is Shailen Gisani.

Before we get into today's podcast, I just wanted to let you know that these podcasts are now available on Stitcher Radio.

I'm not sure how many of you actually use Stitcher Radio at the moment, but I understand that it's growing

as a portal for podcasts, so I just wanted to let you know that we're on there now. So today's

podcast is really exciting for two reasons, really, firstly because it is on one of my favorite

topics to discuss and teach about, and secondly, because I'm joined by two guests, both of whom have been on this

podcast before. So they are Dr. Rosanne Jepson, who is a lecturer in internal medicine

and is our most frequent guests on this podcast series. So thanks Rosanne very much for that.

And we're also joined by Don Barfield, who's a lecturer in emergency and critical care.

Now, he's only made one appearance on this podcast series before.

But as he pointed out to me before we started, that's because I haven't invited him again,

so I will do again in the future.

The other thing I wanted to say is that we were also going to be joined by Nicola Calendra,

who's a lecturer in small animal surgery, but unfortunately she was not able to make it today.

She has, however, sent me some comments that I will read out at the appropriate times.

And finally, just to say that because of the nature of the topic that we're talking about today,

there are a load of things that we're talking about today,

there are a load of things that we're going to cover and there's lots of discussion.

And even though we'll try and keep it, you know, succinct,

I think this is going to end up being too much material for one podcast.

So we've decided to basically split the topic into two podcasts.

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