Samantha Feighery

Samantha Feighery comes from Co Offaly and after working in the financial services industry for five years, she realised that the corporate world was not for her. Growing up, Samantha had always wanted to work with animals, so she decided to apply to UCD to retrain as a Veterinary Nurse and was accepted on to the BSc in Veterinary Nursing programme in 2009; she graduated from the course with a first class honours degree in June 2013.

During her final year rotations, Samantha discovered that she particularly enjoyed working with horses and decided to specialise as an Equine Veterinary Nurse. Since graduating, she has had the opportunity to use her degree internationally, completing a neonatal nursing internship at Hagyard Equine Medical Centre in Kentucky and working for 3 years at the Weipers Equine Centre (University of Glasgow) where she was involved in running a busy equine hospital and responsible for teaching Veterinary Medicine students.  While Samantha enjoyed her time in Glasgow, she missed the intensive care of neonatal medicine, so in 2017, she moved to Rossdales Equine Hospital in Newmarket, UK to complete her second season as a neonatal foal nurse.

Samantha is now Lead Clinical Nurse at Rossdales and is responsible for a team of 11 equine nurses and 6 equine technicians, all whilst getting her annual fill of the fun of foal nursing. In January 2020, she travelled to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia where she spent a month assisting in the setting up and training of staff in a new referral equine hospital in preparation for the most expensive race in the world, The Saudi Cup.

Samantha's particular areas of interest are Neonatal and Intensive Care Nursing along with Infection Control and Biosecurity and to date she has published six articles in leading veterinary publications on these areas.