The Vet Vault: Veterinary Career, Clinical Skills & Wellbeing

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

The long-term vision is that you walk into a clinic, hit record at the beginning of the day - you walk out at the end of the day, and you never put your hands in a computer. You just did medicine, and everything went into the right place.’

Sound too good to be true? Maybe. But it's closer than you think.
If you've already adopted a veterinary AI scribe, you'll know it's transformed your day. But scribes are just the gateway drug. The really interesting question is what your scribe connects to next - and the answer, for a growing number of vets, is the brain of the clinic itself: your practice management software.

This conversation brings together Dr Caleb Frankel, ER vet and founder of Instinct - the PIMS used by many of the world's largest specialty and emergency hospitals, and now built out for general practice too, and Rohan Relan, founder of Scribble Vet. Earlier this year, Instinct acquired Scribble - and what they're building together is a glimpse of where veterinary software could be heading.
You'll  hear:
Why up to 80% of your veterinary work day is swallowed by a keyboard 
What "beyond scribing" looks like - from infographics, to embedded drug references that update in real time as you talk, to anaesthesia records that fill themselves in from across the room.
The "easy to verify, hard to generate" principle - why the best AI tools in clinic don't try to replace you, they let you stay in the loop without doing the grunt work.
What it means when your scribe and your PIMS talk to each other.
Why an "open API" matters more than you think when individual vets can magically build for their own tools.
The tech patient safety layer that can catch your mistakes before you make them
Where this all goes next - and why both guests believe we're still only seeing the beginning of what AI in clinical practice can do.

We recorded this as a video with screen sharing, so if you want to follow along and see what these tools actually look like in action, watch it on Spotify.

For our clinical content, show notes, and our full back catalogue, head to ⁠thevetvault.com⁠. 
While you're there, check out our subscriber-only clinical podcast, our newsletter, and come and hang out with us in real life at ⁠Vets On Tour.

Topics and Timestamps

Why Instinct Acquired Scribble 2:08
Beyond Scribes: The Bigger Vision 7:48
Demo: Scribble + Instinct Integration 10:06
Plums Drug Reference Integration 11:30
Mid-Roll: Events & Announcements 14:49
Pushing Notes to Instinct 16:27
Scribble Features: Translations, Care Cards & More 19:29
Record Review & AI Verifiability 21:28
Instinct PIMS Overview 24:17
Instinct Expands to General Practice 24:51
Instinct Features: Estimates, Safety Warnings & Clinical Tools 32:03
Embedded Scribble: Voice-Controlled Anesthesia Records 38:07
AI Safety: Human in the Loop 38:46
APIs, MCP Servers & Vibe Coding for Vets 45:02
Open vs Closed PIMS Philosophy 50:39

"Maybe we're just picking the wrong people to be vets."
You've probably heard some version of that line. Maybe you've even said it. 'The new grads can't cope. The younger generation is too soft. If this profession isn't working for you, maybe the profession isn't the problem - maybe you are.'
But what if that's the wrong conversation entirely? Maybe it's not the people who need to change - but the job itself.
That's the question at the heart of this conversation with Dr Rebecca Faris, the lead of the Australian Veterinary Association's Thrive programme - an industry attempt to figure out how we make veterinary medicine a profession people can actually stay in and enjoy.
You'll learn:
Why a full-time working week in veterinary medicine probably shouldn't be 40 hours - and the official position from Safe Work Australia that will surprise you
The difference between psychological safety and psychosocial safety (one is a vibe, the other is the law - and if you own a practice in Australia, you need to know which is which)
What the new psychosocial safety legislation actually requires of practice owners 
Why "playing to your strengths" isn't the same as avoiding the hard stuff - and how to have that conversation with your employer without sounding like you're asking for special treatment
The invisible emotional labour tax you're paying on every consult - and why recognising it changes everything
What genuinely great veterinary workplaces are doing differently, and why the "squeaky wheel" narrative is drowning out stories of practices that are getting it right
Why "I can't hack full-time" might not mean there's something wrong with you - and the self-compassion case for rethinking what a sustainable vet career actually looks like
How to get involved in shaping the future of this profession instead of quietly checking out
If you've ever felt wrecked at the end of a perfectly normal day and wondered whether it was you or the job - this one's for you.
Resources mentioned:
The Thrive Programme and 2025 Wellbeing Survey: ava.com.au/thrive
Cultivating Safe Teams training (AVA)
2026 Thrive Wellness Symposium at the AVA Conference, Brisbane, 19 May 2026
Safe Work Australia - psychosocial hazards guidance

This episode is not an ad. We're not paid to feature Thrive or the AVA - we just think this is a conversation the profession needs to be having. If you've got thoughts, pushback, or your own story about thriving (or not) in practice, drop us a line at info@thevetvault.com.
For our clinical content, show notes, and our full back catalogue, head to thevetvault.com.
While you're there, check out our subscriber-only clinical podcast, our newsletter, and come and hang out with us in real life at Vets On Tour.

00:52 Rethinking the 40-Hour Workweek
03:03 Flexibility and Job Crafting
04:57 Are We Picking the Wrong People?
06:05 Playing to Strengths vs Business Needs
12:39 Psychological vs Psychosocial Safety
15:55 The New Laws: Employer Obligations
17:51 Identifying Psychosocial Hazards
20:40 Cultivating Safe Teams Training
24:45 Workload and Emotional Labor
32:34 Vets on Tour Break
34:27 Should Full-Time Be 30 Hours?
36:12 Inside the Thrive Initiative
39:31 Mental Health First Aid
41:35 Empathy for Difficult Clients
44:13 Wins and Optimism
46:27 How to Access Thrive
51:27 Closing Advice: Get Engaged