The Vet Vault: Veterinary Career, Clinical Skills & Wellbeing

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 famou...

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, a...

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...

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 ...

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 c...

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 d...

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 o...

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 d...

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 i...

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 dru...

"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 th...

You know that feeling: exam time is looming.  You've spent three days making flashcards and highlighting your notes, but you haven't even started actually studying yet...

Whether you're a vet student drowning in slide decks, a membership candidate juggling articles and notes, or a resident trying to jam an impossible volume of clinical knowledge into your skull - the way most of us study is, frankly, not backed by the science. ...

Is our podcast getting… repetitive?

Honest question.

Lately, we’ve felt a growing tension behind the mic: are we just saying the same things… just with a new guest and in slightly different ways?

Are we actually helping you? (With is after all the point of this podcast)

In this short solo episode, I ask a few questions that I’d love your input on. 

We want to rebuild this with you. This is your invite.

Feed...

Ever check your payslip… your student debt… your mortgage… and wonder if you’re just treading water?

You’re not alone, and you’re not stuck.

In this episode we revisit one of the most neglected topics in the profession: money.

Hubert sits down with US-based financial adviser Eric Miller to break down the decisions that can actually move the money-needle for employed vets: from budgeting and debt ...

Four years after our original antibiotic myth-busting episode (Ep 60), we’re back with Dr Riati Scarborough to talk antibiotic prescribing habits. This time we’re joined by fellow stewardship expert Dr Laura Hardefeldt, and this time we’re asking the harder question:

Have we actually changed?

The good news? Some prescribing habits are shifting. We’re seeing shorter courses and less ‘just in case antibio...

Veterinary life can feel like a treadmill with no off-switch: 15-minute consults that always run over. Emotional labour no one trains you for. A schedule that swings from slow to chaos - in minutes.

Sound familiar? You’re not alone.

In this raw and refreshingly real episode, productivity coach Demir Bentley (Life Hack Method) live-coaches GP vet Dr Ray Gates, tackling the uncomfortable truth of veterinary medicine:You’re ...

Ever feel like your anxiety or fear of failure is just... who you are?

The perfectionism. The overthinking. The constant pressure to “get it right.”

It can feel like it’s wired into your DNA.

But what if it isn’t?

Dr Rod Irwin, vet, former clinic owner and author tells us how who went from panic attacks in an empty vet clinic to a completely rewired life - thanks to neuroscience.

After hitting breaking point, a c...

Welcome to episode one of our new Tech Tools series, where we cut through the noise to bring you real insights into the latest veterinary tech that could genuinely make your day‑to‑day vet life easier.

In part one VetRec founder Kevin Cohen helps me put this AI scribe through its paces to show us why veterinary AI software is rapidly moving WAY beyond just note taking. 

Highlights :

• What an AI scribe really is and how it save...

Am I a useless vet?

Sounds like a silly question that a new grad might ask, right? But imposter syndrome doesn't care about your credentials.

It whispers that you're a fraud, that you got lucky, that one day everyone will realise you don’t belong. 

Or maybe you don’t feel like an imposter - but you beat yourself up after a case goes wrong. You replay every missed diagnosis. You hold yourself to an impossible st...