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 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