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