The Vet Vault: Fall In Love With Veterinary Science

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

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 [email protected].
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

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. Which is why you might need a little help from technology:
In part two of our Tech Tools for Vets series, software engineer Hasitha Jayatilake joins me to walk you through StudyAnything - an AI-powered study tool that generates quizzes from your notes, tracks your weak spots over time, and builds guided learning pathways based on Bloom's hierarchy of learning. (By the way - he built this tool because he couldn’t bare watching his vet student partner making Anki cards at 2am!)
What you'll learn:
How active recall and spaced repetition actually work - and why highlighting your notes is basically doing nothing
What Bloom's hierarchy means for your study plan - and how Study Anything uses it to move you from rote recall to clinical application
StudyAnything’s guided learning pathway feature (just gone live) - that turns your uploaded notes into a structured lesson plan with concept maps, assumed knowledge, and motivational context
How the community feature works - study groups, shared question banks, and what this means for educators (or podcast hosts!)  who want to create resources
How to generate harder questions on demand - using learning outcomes and difficulty levels to get yourself on the honours roll
What makes this different from Notebook LM or other AI tools 
This episode includes screen sharing, so if you want to follow along, watch the video on Spotify. If you prefer audio only, you'll still get 99% of the value.
The team at StudyAnything are giving Vet Vault listeners the opportunity to try out their top tier subscription (LOTS of quizzes!) with code VETVAULT at studyanything.academy for 50% off your first month on the paid plan. That's about $3.50 to give it a proper test run.
Note: This episode isn't a promotion, endorsement or an ad - it's part of our ongoing series exploring the tools you might be considering. If you have a software you'd like us to look at, let me know at [email protected]
Go to ⁠⁠⁠thevetvault.com⁠⁠ for show notes, access to our clinical continuing education content and to sign up for our weekly 'best of the Vet Vault' ⁠newsletter,⁠ or join us in person at one of our phenomenal ⁠Vets On Tour conferences. ⁠ (Look out for our upcoming New Zealand, Italy and Africa conferences.)

Topics and Timestamps
3:26 Active Recall & The Science of Studying
4:06 How StudyAnything Works - Uploading & Courses
7:57 Bloom's Hierarchy & Learning Outcomes
9:53 Ad Break - Vets on Tour
11:24 Quiz Demo
19:28 Guided Learning Pathway
20:15 File Summary, Concept Maps & Key Terms
29:10 Study Groups & Communities
31:02 Comparison with Notebook LM & Competitors
32:32 Spaced Repetition & Future Features
37:29 Pricing
39:48 Deep Dive: Navigating the Dashboard
41:00 Deep Dive: Creating & Customising Quizzes

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.

Feedback to [email protected], or at our contact form on the website, or hit me up in the comments on Spotify.