You know that feeling when the ‘not breathing well’ patient gets rushed to your crash bench, and you stand there with your stethoscope trying to look like your planning, but actually, you’re just panicking... You have to do something, but what? Where do you begin?! This is exactly why I loved this conversation with ECC specialist and Director of Animal Emergency Australia, Dr Rob Webster, about the 6 steps that will help you localise the problem in the respiratory distress patient. Because once you localise it, you have a DD list, and you have a plan. Dr Rob guides us through the first minutes of assessing the respiratory distress veterinary patient and shows us how to quickly assess breathing patterns and sounds to help you pin-point and fix the problem. Trail our clinical subscription for free at vvn.supercast.com to access the show notes for this episode and to listen to all 500+ of our clinical episodes. Get help with your tricky cases in our Specialist Support Space. Connect with us through our online Vet Vault Network for episode highlights, clinical resources, discussions, questions and support. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here for Hubert's favourite clinical and non-clinical learnings from the week. Join us for a snow conference in Japan or in Wanaka with Vets On Tour: email vetsontour@gmail.com for details. (And tell Dave I sent you for your 10% discount!) Topic list: 5:49 Step 1: Evaluate respiratory effort. 11:31 Step 2: Is the breathing noisy? 20:22 Step 3: Is the chest wall intact? 28:16 Step 4: Is the breathing fast and shallow? 36:27 Step 5: Fast and shallow, but with nothing abnormal on lung imaging. 38:01 Step 6: Non-respiratory causes.