The Vet Vault: Veterinary Career, Clinical Skills & Wellbeing

Most conversations about how to survive a veterinary career is a conversation with the survivors. We interview the vets who are still standing. The vets and nurses who left? Nobody interviews them. In this episode you’ll hear why we should be listening to these voices.
Dr Alex Harrison is a veterinarian, a former practice partner, and the founder of the inclusion consultancy Vetquity. He is also profoundly deaf, and in this conversation he shares about what it cost him to spend years desperately trying to compensate inside a system that was never designed for people like him.
This is not a soft conversation about being nicer to each other. It is a practical lesson in workflow design, retention economics, and why we spend more time thinking about our next CT scanner than about the people who will operate it.
You'll learn:
Why the survivorship bias in our burnout conversations matters clinically and commercially - and what we systematically fail to see when we only study the people still in the job.
How to tell the difference between ‘unavoidable bullets’ from friendly fire. Some parts of veterinary practice is genuinely hard. A lot of what exhausts you is avoidable system design that we have mislabelled as inevitable.
"Solve for one, solve for all." Why the accommodation you make for one team member is usually just data about where the friction sits for everyone - and why "special treatment" resentment is mostly a myth.
The hidden curriculum: the shadow syllabus that runs alongside anatomy and pharmacology, rewarding endurance, stoicism and self-sacrifice while suppressing help-seeking. Name it, tame it, reframe it.
Why the resilience narrative lets us off the hook.
What internalised ableism looks like in a high-achieving vet - and how it ends in burnout.
The one thing Alex would tell every new graduate to look for in a job interview.

Join us in the Italian Dolomites in January 2027 for our snow conference - world-class CE sandwiched between skiing, snowshoeing, thermal spas and very long mountain lunches: vetsontour.com
Find show notes, clinical content and everything else at thevetvault.com, subscribe to the newsletter, and come and join the conversation in the Vet Vault Network.

Resources and links mentioned
Vetquity - Alex's consultancy: toolkits, advisory work and speaking on structural inclusion in veterinary workplaces
2025 AVA President's Award: Dr Alex Harrison
The Anti-Ableist Manifesto by Tiffany Yu
Stronger by Dr Dinesh Palipana OAM - the quadriplegic emergency doctor whose story reframes what "capable" means
Dr Anna Dengate on reasonable residencies - our earlier episode on rethinking whether specialist training has to be full-time
Dr Jocelyn Birch Baker - building a thriving regional practice staffed almost entirely by part-time parents (Smooth Operating Vets)
Abraham Wald and survivorship bias - the statistician who worked out which parts of the bomber to armour

Topics and Timestamps
0:00 Intro: The Planes That Never Came Home
3:02 Welcome & The Survivorship Bias Post
4:11 Why Inclusion Matters for the Profession
7:57 Avoidable vs Unavoidable Bullets
10:42 Solve for One, Solve for All
17:03 The Hidden Curriculum
22:35 The Problem with the Resilience Narrative
27:07 Fear and Co-Design in Practice
39:43 Alex's Burnout Story & Internalised Ableism
42:02 Defining Ableism
45:36 Vetquity & Where to Start
48:19 Rapid Fire & Closing

Think about the last thing you did at work and forgot to charge for. A nail clip. A blood test. A “quick” ultrasound that never made it onto the invoice.
One missed charge feels insignificant. Across an entire clinic, it isn’t.  (It’s estimated that the average veterinary clinic misses between 5% and 10% of its charges!)
In this episode of our Tech for Vets series, Dr Patrik Holmboe from Nova Vet Family demonstrates SmartCapture, an AI tool that compares clinical notes with billed items to identify services that may have slipped through the cracks.
But this isn’t about chasing clients for forgotten charges or blaming individual vets. It’s about finding patterns and fixing systems. Which charges are missed most often? Why are they being missed, and what can you change in your workflow to stop the same leak recurring?
Patrik explains how SmartCapture learns the billing patterns of an individual clinic, and how clinic leaders can turn billing data into practical changes without simply telling the team to “charge better.”
This episode includes a screen demonstration. You’ll still get the important ideas on audio, but you can watch the video version on Spotify to follow the walkthrough.
Resources mentioned
Learn more about Nova Vet Family’s SmartCapture
AAHA: Maybe Money Does Grow on Trees
Subscribe to The Vet Vault newsletter
Vet Science Week 2026
Vets on Tour conferences
ASAV Annual Conference with the Veterinary Business Group
Greencross CONNECT26 Clinical Conference

Topics and time stamps
02:46 Meet Dr Patrik Holmboe & Nova Vet Family04:11 How SmartCapture Works06:45 The Scale of Missed Billing16:16 Potential vs. Confirmed Missed Charges21:11 Why AI Scribes Improve Results23:21 Turning Data Into Action25:29 Top Missed Charges & Tactical Focus35:28 Workflow & PMS Integration52:04 Wrap-Up & Newsletter

Twelve years ago, Dr Janey Lowes went to Sri Lanka on a holiday, and never really came home. Today she runs WECare Worldwide, a hospital that treats the island’s three million street dogs to a standard that you’d like your pet treated - from the worst trauma cases you can image do a highly efficient desexing service.  And then, a few times a year, she flies back to locum in clinics that look a lot like yours.
This one's about what it's like to live on both sides of that line that separates the reason we became vets, and the job most of us ended up with.
We get into:
Do-or-die medicine in a place where you're the only option
How being the last line changes your perspectives, and what that does to your goalposts when you go back to first-world practice
The bits of ‘normal’ practice that Janey misses the most (no, it’s not the fancy equipment)
Charity vetting as a viable career option, not just a gap year - the good and the bad 

Support WECare Worldwide:This work runs on donations, and Janey's currently raising for a new hospital by running six hundred kilometres, the length of Sri Lanka. (She’s not actually a runner…)
Website and donations: https://wecareworldwide.org.uk
The charity takes volunteers and offers longer-term work 
Volunteer and work with WECare: https://wecareworldwide.org.uk/volunteer/
WECare on Instagram: @wecare_srilanka
Find Janey:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/janeythevet
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@janeythevet
Her book, Janey the Vet: Saving Sri Lanka's Street Dogs, is on Amazon, Waterstones and WH Smith
More from The Vet Vault:
Everything we do lives at https://www.thevetvault.com, including our clinical CE podcasts and resources
Come learn with us in person at Vets on Tour: https://vetsontour.com

Topics and Time Stamps
03:20 Going Viral, and the Unexpected Backlash
08:24 The Love-Hate of Social Media
10:17 The Birth of WeCare
13:24 75% of Dogs Are Unowned
13:53 Courage or Naivety?
16:35 Mid-Roll Break
18:31 Regrets? & Life in Sri Lanka
21:30 Two Lives: Sri Lanka vs UK
36:15 Are We Too Quick to Euthanise?
39:55 What We Underestimate and Undervalue in ‘normal’ Vet Life
43:22 Volunteering at WeCare
49:03 Charity Vetting as a Career
55:10 Rapid Fire Questions
59:21 Advice for New Grads

You've been using your veterinary AI note taker for a couple of years now - it’s great - saves you heaps of time. 
But are you using it to its full potential?
I’ll take a bet that you’re not. These things move fast, and it’s hard to keep up. 
Which is why, in our Tech for Vets Series, we pull apart the veterinary tools that are changing how we work, and this time we put Heidi up on our screens for a detailed walk through.  
Our guide is Dr Kieran McLeod, head of medical knowledge at Heidi Health. We start by putting the scribe through its paces to find the workflow tricks that you’re probably missing - I walked away with at least five tricks I'd never used. Then Kieran shows off all the shiny new AI magic coming your way: voice agents, built-in clinical support and a hardware solution that lets you leave your phone in your bag. 
You'll learn:
The scribe features you're almost certainly ignoring - linked patients, the context window, smart dictation, and the one-click voice edits that mean you never type a note correction again
The AI voice agent that makes the phone call you've been dreading 
What baked-in clinical decision support looks like
How to safety-net the worry that keeps you up - that quiet "did I miss something?" feeling
How to incorporate hands-free hardware into your workflow

This is a screen-share walkthrough, so head to Spotify if you want to watch the clicks rather than just hear us talk about them.

Show notes and details live at thevetvault.com
Get clinical support from human specialists at the Vet Vault Specialist Support Space
Get rid of your mid-year 'meh' at our Vets On Tour New Zealand snow conference

Topics and Timestamps
02:35 Intro: Beyond the scribe0
05:18 Human-first vs. vet-first: does it matter?
09:17 Note-taking basics
09:46 Context windows & linked patients
15:46 Multiple documents & the source of truth
18:49 Smart Dictation for quick edits
29:38 Sync changes across documents
33:10 Task lists
36:06 Collaboration & session sharing
40:07 Sharing & exporting documents
41:22 Heidi Comms: AI voice agents
53:46 Heidi Evidence: clinical decision support
01:04:50 Using Evidence for complex histories
01:09:11 Evidence sources & collections
01:14:01 Heidi Remote: the hardware mic
01:21:46 EMR integrations (ezyVet & Covetrus)

A surgeon hurls a scalpel across theatre. It clatters off the wall. Nobody looks up. 
Twenty minutes later he's in the tearoom offering everyone a biscuit, and someone shrugs: "That's just him when he's stressed."
If you've worked in veterinary practice for any length of time, you've got your own version of that story - maybe a bit less dramatic, but still things that completely destroy psychological safety.  This episode is about that stuff, and the new psychosocial safety laws now rolling out across Australia that say plainly: no, actually, that's not acceptable. 
To make sense of what that looks like on a normal Tuesday in a normal practice, you'll hear from psychologist Rhonda Andrews, who works across high-pressure industries - emergency departments, the courts, and the veterinary profession - and who has spent years watching them all wrestle with the same problem: people breaking. 
This conversation is not about “just be more resilient”, but about systems. Rhonda makes a genuinely good-news case that these laws aren't more bureaucracy to dread - they're the push our profession has needed all along.

You'll hear
Why the things you've always filed under "just  part the job" might now legally count as a psychological workplace injury - with consequences attached
The myth spreading fastest right now - that bosses can no longer have an honest performance conversation - and why that's flatly wrong 
What the new psychosocial safety laws actually require of you as a practice owner
Why this a team problem, not just something for management to sort out
Why "workload" is almost never the real problem - and the thing breaking your team underneath it that owners consistently miss
The one shift available to everyone in the building - whatever their title - that changes culture without a single policy change
A note: this is the second in a small psych-safety miniseries. If you haven't heard Episode 158 with Dr Rebecca Faris on the AVA Thrive programme, start there for the bigger picture.

Resources:
Barrington Centre - Rhonda's psychosocial safety seminars (two online sessions, plus an in-person Melbourne day) and the Vet ECM training programmes for owners, leaders, and new supervisors: barringtoncentre.com

For show notes, clinical content and the newsletter head to thevetvault.com, and come find your people at a Vets On Tour conference -  email me at info@thevetvault.com to find out about our new-grad 50% discount for Wānaka inAugust.

Topics and time stamps

04:52 Rising Mental Health Claims
08:41 Mythbusting Owners Fears1
0:37 Defining Psychological Safety
12:37 Vets Staying in Bad Jobs
14:28 Sponsor Break Vets On Tour
16:03 Systems vs Individual Responsibility
19:35 Burnout Stats and Human Cost
21:17 Who Can Influence Culture?
22:46 Is Vet Work Uniquely Hard?
24:05 Human Sector Parallels
29:15 Business Model Reality Check
30:18 ROI of Retention
32:20 Psychosocial Safety Laws
37:34 Workload and Rostering Fixes4
2:44 Leadership and Being Heard
45:27 From Blame to Pathways
50:27 Training Programs and Teams
52:58 Myth Busting Performance Reviews
54:27 Final Takeaways