Table 5.

Quotations from Vet interviews.

1. Managing antibiotic resistance in practice
Knowledge	“If it wasn't too inflamed we'd be managing it with a chlorhexidine-based wash to try and keep it under control with anti-inflammatories without throwing antibiotics at it unnecessarily.” (Vet 01)
Beliefs	“For me the key thing is that we don't use it [antibiotics] unless we feel we have to, and when we do, we follow guidelines on what's considered to be first-line usage and we only escalate onto second-line, third-line antibiotics on the back of culture and sensitivities, so I think increasingly we're… I'd like to think we're fairly good here…” (Vet 04)
Recognition of AMR as a problem	“We're seeing an increase in resistance of individual infections to what we would call the normal antibiotics that we are used to reaching for on our shelves…” (Vet 03)
2. Barriers preventing ideal practice
Habit	“I knew I could treat symptomatically so I could pick my favorite antibiotic.” (Vet 01)
Workload	“I get a lot of, maybe tricky ones sort of passed on to me so vaguely unwell animals I see quite a lot of, and I tend to get quite a lot of skin cases, and um, yeah, cardiac cases as well, cardio-respiratory I tend to get referred onto me.” (Vet 04)
Clients	“People have very high expectations of vets because they can get an appointment the same day… they then expect us to fix their animals same day, and sometimes you just have to manage the owner expectations.” (Vet 07)
Diagnostics	“…sometimes financial constraints are a bit of a hassle for us in general practice as you would like to base everything on a culture and sensitivity but it's just not possible to spend that extra 60 quid.” (Vet 05)
Existing treatments	“I feel that there's a lot of polypharmacy going on, you know most of them will have 3, 3 ingredients, an anti-inflammatory, an anti-fungal and anti-bacterial whereas a lot of the time you've just got yeast in there so you want an anti-fungal.” (Vet 05)
3. Desire to be a good vet
Experience	“I found that by standard I would never prescribe less than a 5 day course, and generally it will be more than 7 days… but I always find it difficult to kind of know when to stop the antibiotics. So I just kind of try to get a feel for it.” (Vet 08)
Confidence	“…now that I'm older it's like “no” and I don't care, I can call the practice manager if you want, you can speak to them, but we're not going to give antibiotics, and I think when I was younger, I might have caved in.” (Vet 10)
Lost touch with antibiotics	“My knowledge of antibiotics has deteriorated since qualifying in that I kind of forget which ones are sort of cell-wall inhibitors and things like that…” (Vet 01)
Motivated	“I think it's just trying to bear it in the back of your mind ‘this isn't right' and thinking back, ‘let's do better.” (Vet 04)