The Vet Vault: Veterinary Career, Clinical Skills & Wellbeing

Why does a vet who's flat out every single day still hit a pay ceiling? Dr Andy Roark explains the hidden economics of veterinary practice, and an uncomfortable truth: the thing that makes us good vets might be the same thing holding our pay down.

Andy is a practising vet, the founder of the Uncharted Veterinary Conference and podcast, host of The Cone of Shame podcast, and one of the best-known voices on the business side of vet medicine. He works with thousands of practice owners and managers, and he's still in the consult room too, trying to figure out how to find solutions for a client with $150 to her name - like you. In this conversation, he picks apart the sum every employed vet has done on the back of a lab result printout: why is there such a big mismatch between what I’m treating and the number on my pay slip?

In this episode, he explains:

■ The Mediocre Industry Problem: Why it's better to be mediocre in an exceptional industry than exceptional in a mediocre one, and where vet medicine sits on that scale.

■ The Inherent Tension: Why veterinary profession is one of the only jobs where we beg customers not to leave, and how our drive to keep care affordable puts the ceiling on what we earn.

■ Where Every Dollar Goes: The three buckets that eat 85 to 90 cents of every dollar a practice brings in, and the one number that puts everything in perspective. 

■ The Invisible Stress of Ownership: Why practice owners often feel real shame when pay comes up, and how much of the finances they should share with their team.

■ Resentment as a Metric: How to tell when resentment is warning you about something, and how to choose what to do about it.

■ Corporate vs Independent: What a US survey found about who earns more and who finds more meaning in their work, and why comparing salaries is so often the thief of joy.

■ The Retail Model Mistake: The one thing Andy would change if he could rebuild the profession from scratch.

Mentioned in this episode

• The 10th Anniversary Uncharted Veterinary Conference 
• Cone of Shame Podcast
• The Uncharted Veterinary Podcast
• Blunt Dissection with Dr Dave Nicol
• Questions With Crocker with Dr Tanasia Crocker
• Fictional podcast 
• StoryCorps

Come skiing with us (while you learn)

Vets On Tour is heading to the Dolomites. It's a week of CPD in Canazei, Italy, from 16 to 23 January 2027, with a Dolomiti Superski pass covering 1,200 km of runs. The learning is excellent, the snow is better, and the après is non-negotiable. Book your spot here.

Topics and time stamps

| 2:38 | Money & Business in Vet Medicine – Why vets are uncomfortable talking money 

| 3:55 | "Money is not distributed fairly" – Mediocre industry vs. exceptional industry 

| 5:06 | The Disney World analogy – Why vets can't just walk away from unpaying clients 

| 7:07 | The Inherent Tension – Caring for pets vs. maximising revenue 

| 9:31 | Why Employees Don't See the Full Picture – The young vet's $50/hr frustration

| 14:04 | Compensation is more than money – Benefits, culture, flexibility & context 

| 18:53 | Corporatisation & high salaries leading to unhappiness 

| 22:35 | Resentment as a Metric – Choosing how you suffer 

| 23:49 | The Dollar Conversation: "Andy, explain my pay" 

| 27:29 | The Anchor Principle – Why clients think vet care is overpriced 

| 29:13 | The Three Buckets – Labor Cost of Goods Overhead 

| 33:54 | The Invisible Stress of Ownership – Catastrophising & shielding the team 

| 37:53 | The Medusa Problem – Building trust before tackling money conversations 

| 41:37 | Empathy for the business owner – Shame, fear & emotional baggage around money 

| 45:49 | Corporate vs. Independent – Trust, meaning & pay trade-offs 

| 49:07 | "Comparison is the thief of joy" – Don't chase dollars alone 

| 54:42 | The Pass-Along Question – Redesigning the vet profession from scratch 

Ask most vets what feedback means, and they'll think of a meeting. Once a year - maybe someone explaining that you're not billing enough.

Dr Liv Oginska reckons that meeting is barely feedback at all.

Because real feedback is happening all day: the look on your face when someone walks in, whether you say the thing you've been wrestling with for three weeks, or take it home and complain about it to your partner instead.

There's a famous quote: 'The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.'

In this episode, we fix that. Liv shows what to actually say when someone goes straight to defensive, why you should never label their emotion, and the work you need to do on yourself first. Plus her practical advice on receiving feedback well.

Dr Olivia Oginska is a vet, emotional intelligence specialist, certified workplace conflict mediator, lecturer at Murdoch University and founder of Human-Savvy. She's also just published research examining the links between feedback skills, psychological safety and turnover intention in veterinary organisations. In other words: does the way we talk to each other influence whether people want to leave? (Spoiler: it matters!)

Somewhere in your practice there's a conversation nobody is having. It's already changing how everyone behaves.

This episode is about having it.

Resources and links

• Liv's work: Human-Savvy  A new cohort of the year-long Human-Savvy League leadership mastermind opens in October 2026.
• The Human-Savvy Symposium - a full day of this, in person, Brisbane, Friday 6 November 2026.
• Stuck on a case and want a specialist's eyes on it? Come and ask in our specialist support space.
• Close to 700 clinical episodes with full show notes: thevetvault.com (click "clinical content")
• Vets on Tour - Italy 2027 and the Serengeti with Prof Jill Maddison and Prof Dave Church: vetsontour.com

Topics and time stamps

Why Liv Researched This Topic (4:40)  

Personal Feedback Stories: Good and Bad (8:11)  

Sponsor Break (12:24)  

Feedback Is Constant, Not Just Formal (13:17)  

Defining Psychological Safety (19:48)  

Personality, Environment, and Fear of Conflict (23:32)  

Two-Way Feedback: Leaders and Employees (26:12)  

Behaviours That Destroy Psychological Safety (31:15)  

Handling Defensiveness (33:29)  

Practical Roleplay: Giving Difficult Feedback (37:17)  

Feedback vs. Other Causes of Turnover (42:53)  

A Vision for the Future of the Profession (47:14)  

Closing Thoughts (49:52)

What if the thing making your working day harder isn’t the workload?

What if it's the building?

In this episode we're joined by Jerry Kennard from ⁠Evoke Projects⁠, someone who designs veterinary spaces for a living and has watched a lot of owners get this expensively wrong. Because a practice build always starts as a dream: the right location, the beautiful fit-out - the clinic you've always wanted. But plan it wrong, and that dream can quickly turn into a trap that stifles growth and demotivates teams . And most of it comes down to five mistakes that are a lot easier to avoid before you sign anything than after.

In this episode, you'll learn:

• Why falling in love with your site might be the single most expensive mistake you can make
• The "too big or too small" problem, and how to future-proof for expansion without drowning in debt
• Why designing for the pet and the client but forgetting your team is a false economy
• How lean design and smart workflow let you do more in less space, without burning anyone out

A great clinic isn't designed to look good on opening day. It's designed to perform every day. Join us to find out how.

For more episodes like this with practical insights for practice owners join us on the Veterinary Business Accelerator podcast.

Join Hugh and Jerry on a Vets on Tour adventure: https://vetsontour.com/

Everyone says burnout. But Dr Sarah Golding thinks a lot of us are misdiagnosing ourselves.

When vets come to her ready to walk away from the profession, they arrive with a vocabulary: burnt out, overwhelmed, imposter syndrome. Not one of them opens with the word Sarah reckons is often actually doing the damage:

Fear.

Fear of failing. Fear of the money conversation. Fear of the board, the Facebook post, the Monday morning debrief. And the big one, the one that shows up in almost every list she asks vets to write: fear of criticism, mostly from each other.

Every fear you carry into a consult room was handed to you somewhere along your path - often by someone with good intentions - a teacher, a mentor, a friend.

So we get into what to do about it. How to run a debrief that lets someone put a mistake down instead of carrying it for a decade. Why "don't worry about it, mate" is just as unhelpful as shouting. The difference between practising defensively and practising to help, and why clients can sense which one you are within seconds. Sarah's "debrief and dump it" process, complete with the literal bucket in her clinic that gets burnt at the Christmas party. And a small structural fix for the money conversation that has all but ended adult tantrums at her front desk.

Dr Sarah Golding is a mixed practice vet in her second decade, principal practitioner and co-manager at Gowrie Vet Clinic in NSW, and this year a finalist in the NSW/ACT AgriFutures Rural Women's Award for her mentoring work through The Vet Mind Mentor.

Somewhere in your career there's a case that wrote a rule about what you're good at, and what you avoid. This episode is about going back and reading that rule properly.

Resources and links

• Sarah's work: The Vet Mind Mentor - the Resilient Vet Mastermind and mindset course, plus a free strategy call. Instagram: @thevet_mindmentor
• Close to 700 clinical episodes with full show notes: thevetvault.com (click "clinical content")
• Connect26, Greencross's conference, Brisbane, 7-8 November. Open to everyone in the profession. 20% off with code VETVAULT20: book here
• Vets on Tour - Italy 2027 and the Serengeti with Prof Jill Maddison and Prof Dave Church: vetsontour.com

Topics and time stamps

03:01 - Fear in veterinary practice

06:23 - What feeling are we chasing?

09:28 - Guilt, disconnect and early burnout

11:58 - The six categories of fear

13:33 - Where our fears come from

14:30 - Mid-roll: Vet Vault updates

16:05 - How we gift our fears to colleagues

20:02 - System failure vs personal failure

21:55 - The itty bitty shitty committee

23:16 - Healthy caution vs paralysing fear

26:22 - The debrief and dump it process

28:24 - Accountability without shame

34:56 - Imposter syndrome as hidden fear

36:11 - Are vets more scared today?

38:22 - You don't need all the answers

40:02 - Defensive medicine vs helping

46:03 - Consult room formula and money conversations

54:45 - The changing fear behaviour activity

1:01:57 - Schedule anxiety and work-life balance

1:03:20 - Wrap-up: podcast picks and final thoughts

1:08:22 - Advice for the new grads of 2026

I love any new tool that can make my life as a veterinarian easier and get better outcomes for my patients, so when I first heard about IDEXX's new CancerDx test I was excited, but I had questions! Like, how is a cancer screening test useful to my patients, how reliable is it, why can’t I just use FNA, and how am I going to incorporate it into my workflows?

In this episode I chat to oncologist Dr Sandra Nguyen to find out how she thinks about this test for her patients, and where it fits into our lives as general practitioners. 

We cover:

• A genuinely memorable way to finally keep sensitivity and specificity straight 
• The advertised numbers for Cancer Dx, and how that compares to FNA cytology
• The two clinical scenarios where Dr Sandra finds it most useful: the vaguely "cancery" dog, and annual screening in at-risk breeds
• Why you should keep those slides on the shelf when owners are undecided about chemo
• What to actually do with a positive result in a happy, healthy dog

If this is the kind of clinical content you want more of, our full library of case-based CE lives at ⁠https://thevetvault.com⁠.

Want to join us on a ski lift? Vets On Tour is where CE happens in ski boots, saunas, and the occasional conference room. Come find us at https://vetsontour.com/

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 [email protected] 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