Burnout to Balance: The Vet Profession’s Next Chapter

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In this week’s episode:

• Challenging “Hero Culture” – Veterinary leadership should model healthy boundaries by taking breaks, respecting personal commitments, and fostering a culture of flexibility and wellbeing.
• Systemic Wellbeing Support – Beyond individual resilience, the industry needs modernised workplace structures, research-led wellbeing strategies, and proactive adaptation to changing societal stresses.
• Supporting Parents in Practice – Empathy, flexible scheduling, financial awareness, and realistic expectations are crucial to retaining talented veterinary parents and reducing career attrition.
• Harnessing AI for the Future – By partnering with tech developers, veterinary teams can shape AI tools to improve patient care and team sustainability while maintaining the profession’s human-centred values.

Veterinary leader Liz Barton joins the Modern Veterinary Practice Podcast to explore tackling retention, wellbeing, parenting challenges, and the role of AI in building a sustainable and fulfilling future for the profession.

Additional Guest Spotlights

• Recommend Resource: This week’s top resource comes from Matt Madden, who recommends Grow with Google – a free platform with a dedicated AI section that cuts through the hype and confusion. Whether you’re a practice owner or part of the team, it’s a great starting point to grasp AI fundamentals and explore how these tools can make your clinic more efficient. Built by Google, it’s an accessible way to understand where technology is headed and how you can put it to work in veterinary practice.
  
• Next Episode Sneak Peak: Next time on the Modern Veterinary Practice Podcast, Dr. Lauren Jones – practice owner and Director of Veterinary Medicine at Shepherd Veterinary Software – shares how she redesigned her career around joy, balance, and tech that truly serves vet teams. Discover how she empowers staff, embraces change, and uses automation to free more time for patient care and client connection – keeping the human heart of veterinary medicine front and centre.
  

Show Notes

• Out every other week on your favourite podcast platform.
• Presented by Jack Peploe: Veterinary IT Expert, Certified Ethical Hacker, CEO of Veterinary IT Services and dog Dad to the adorable Puffin.
• As Head of Communications for VetCT and founder of WellVet, Liz Barton brings extensive experience and a varied portfolio career to exploring solutions that support the health and happiness of people and pets. She drives collaborative conversations on industry challenges and opportunities, builds peer support communities, and hosts events that create safe spaces for honest dialogue and meaningful social connection.
• Passionate about the role of technology in improving access to care, workflow efficiencies, clinical outcomes, and knowledge sharing, Liz also champions initiatives that enhance the mental, physical, and social wellbeing of veterinary teams. Her work focuses on creating a happier, healthier veterinary workforce while maintaining high standards of client service and animal welfare.
• Liz is committed to addressing the veterinary profession’s significant diversity gap, particularly in leadership roles. She has been a vocal advocate for women’s health, parenting in the profession, and self-worth, encouraging women to pursue fulfilling careers in veterinary medicine while being kinder to themselves.

Transcription

Jack Peploe:

Coming up on Modern Veterinary Practice,

Liz Barton:

I think there is still that underlying hero culture, the sort of celebrating of the people that can work the longest hours and work through their lunch breaks. I still hear that, and I think we do need to continually call it out and just say, actually the hero culture is the leader who says, right, I’m going off for my lunch break. This is my protected time. And make sure you do the same and who says, oh, I need to go and look after my kids because things have happened at home. And building the flexibility to allow that for other team members as well. So actually modelling the fact that working life is a continuum and we do need to respect the fact that we need to eat, sleep, socialise, and recover properly in order to be sustained in the workplace and for longer.

Jack Peploe:

Welcome to the Modern Veterinary Practice Podcast. I’m your host and veterinary IT expert, Jack Peploe. In this episode, I’ll be welcoming Liz Barton, head of communications at Vet CT, co-founder of World Vet and Vet Mumms. To the podcast, we’ll be exploring how to build a sustainable and fulfilling future for veterinary professionals diving into topics such as workforce retention, wellbeing, parenting and practice, and the role of AI in shaping profession.

Liz Barton:

Thanks for having me, Jack on the podcast. I am Liz Barton. I am a vet. Graduated in 2004. I went straight into mixed practice, had three years, fantastic. Using the vast majority of my degree in a clinic up there in Cambria. And then I moved into a small animal internship for a year to sort of dabbled with specialist and specialist training. That really wasn’t my bag. So moved back into GP practice and I did a variety of things. So week on, week off nights to begin with. Then a mix of shelter, medicine, regular GP practice. And then around the 20 teens I started becoming interested in some of the challenges in the profession, becoming a parent myself. So starting to create resources and talk about parenting in the profession and the challenges of balancing family life alongside a pretty demanding career. And then also around wellbeing, trying to improve the accessibility of wellbeing resources to veterinary teams.

And all of that led to accidental diversification. In my career, I had to learn a lot of new skills, everything from event management, pr, marketing, communications, which then opened up additional opportunities, nonclinical opportunities. I’ve done all sorts of different roles in different organisations, but I am now currently has led me to my current role as head of communications for Vet CT, which is a specialist teleradiology and advice service to veterinary teams around the world. I still run well Vets as a not not-for-profit wellbeing organisation Alongside that, and I’m also one of the co-founders of the Vet Mums Facebook group as well. So still involved in discussing those ongoing challenges.

Jack Peploe:

Awesome. Liz, it’s great to have you on the Modern Veterinary Practice podcast. How are you doing today?

Liz Barton:

I’m doing very well, thank you. Yeah, I’ve had an interesting day. I’m also on BVA policy committee, so I had an interesting day in London yesterday looking at some of the wider issues of the profession. And then I’m back doing the day job today, just interesting news stories to write up in partnership with our clients about some of the cases that we’ve supported with. So yeah, all of the things that I do really appeal to me. I really enjoy the day to day and the variety that I have. And then hopping onto a podcast with you as well, so plenty of variety.

Jack Peploe:

I was going to say you definitely keep yourself busy and you have got quite a serious and diverse career clinically, but also advocacy, communications and leadership across the different facets of the industry, which is amazing. Now what stand out to me is that your work isn’t just about identifying problems, it’s about actively looking for solutions, whether that’s through, you mentioned vet moms and well vets or even deed your research on AI and veterinary medicine, which obviously excites me being a techie. Now today, I’d love to dig into the big question, how do we build a sustainable, fulfilling future for veterinary professionals? Now, I’m hoping, and that obviously always depends on time. We’re going to cover everything from workforce retention and wellbeing to the role of AI and responsible innovation in shaping veterinary practice. Does that sound alright?

Liz Barton:

Yeah, and that’s what, well, in the PR world we would call a wicked problem, and you could look at that as in the kind of, hey, down with it, wicked as in, there’s lots of really meaty interesting stuff to tackle there or the wicked thing that it’s never going to go away. It’s just a constant learning, constant iteration over time. But a lot of these challenges are ongoing and it’s how we then continually adapt and do better. So let’s get stuck in.

Jack Peploe:

Cool. Awesome. Well, let’s start with one of the big ones, retention. From your perspective, what are the biggest reasons people leave the profession and what’s often missed in these conversations?

Liz Barton:

I think personally I found the training to become a vet is so focused around that the clinical, and it’s something that you feel a real privilege to be in vet school, to be learning to be doing for what most of us is our dream career. And then when you get out into clinical practice, it’s so different. The day job is so different from all of the clinical stuff that you’ve learned. And I know that since I graduated, obviously there’s a huge amount more integration of things like communication skills and the importance of human factors and the importance of that sort of vet led care as part of a wider team and collaboration with the owner. But some of the challenges that are still there that present ongoing stresses are things like the conversations around finance, money, et cetera. We would still all love to be able to provide veterinary care for free and not have those conversations.

And that does create a lot of challenges. The fact that there are workforce shortages, so quite a lot of people are under pressure from that perspective. The fact that when you get out into the big wide world and there are all the challenges of modern life, it’s an increasingly challenging world problem to live and existed. And when you see that actually compared to comparable professions, your salary is lower. It’s not all about money, but money gives you options and gives you choice. And so I think the relatively lower salaries that vets and vets nurses have compared to sort of comparably trained professionals does put additional pressure on over time. And then of course, it’s such an emotive job as well. It does take a lot of your emotion and mental and physical capacity as well. It really is that sort of wholehearted vocation. It’s a really difficult job to pick up and put down and mentally it’s constantly on your mind. So that recovery from work piece is really hard. And I think all of these things contribute to whether it’s burnout or compassion fatigue or whether it’s frustration essentially, or whether it’s just ongoing stresses. It’s sort of different things for different people. But I think it is all of those things, whether they’re separate issues or combined together does mean that people that look elsewhere, whether it’s reducing the hours, so staying within the profession, but reducing the clinical hours, maybe doing some non-clinical work alongside or whether it is stepping away from clinical practice altogether.

Jack Peploe:

No, absolutely. I want to kind of pick on and expand on one of the items that you mentioned, which is kind of the wellbeing aspect because often framed as something individuals need to manage and get on with. But obviously you’ve been a strong advocate for systematic change or systemic changes. Sorry. What needs to shift at an industry level to truly support veterinary professionals in your opinion?

Liz Barton:

I think what we need to take a fresh look at, I think back in when I started setting up, well vet in the 20 teens, there was some really obvious things like things like stress management, like access to flexible working longer consultation sessions because you couldn’t prime it all into 10 minutes and looking at more breaks within the day. All of those sort of quite straightforward human factors that were just being ignored before. And I think we have shifted with that. Things are better in practice and more sustainable from that point of view. But I think generally across society, we are seeing wellbeing, mental health in particular being increasingly impacted, whether that’s as a result of the hangovers from COVID where we all went through that period of challenge, whether it’s the fact that the rise of social media and the internet and the always on culture impact that that’s having just on our general grumbling stress levels if you like.

There’s just a lot more mental capacity that’s being used constantly because of all of those things or whether it’s the general sort of world state, the kind of ongoing concerns that are out there, the wars, the climate crisis, et cetera. The unknowns around things like AI just again, causing that underlying ongoing stress. And in terms of what we can do as an industry for that, I think absolutely there needs to be a bit of a culture shift in terms of yes, we have moved away from some of the more stressful ways that practices worked around those working, sorry, I tripped over my words there. Don’t worry in terms of what the industry needs to do around that. Yes, we may have made certain workplace adjustments, but I think we need a fresh look at what does good modern working life look like? And I don’t say work life balance.

I don’t think of it as life at one end, work at the other. And they’re sort of on a balancing scale together. I think it’s about our working lives. As I say, quite often we take our work home with us or we bring our life to work. I don’t think the two of them are separate. And I think sometimes life can be more stressful than work, and sometimes work can be more stressful than life outside of work. So I think just having understanding how we can support people better in their ongoing working lives, and that does involve considerations outside of the practice and considerations within the practice. One of the biggest things I think we can do is actually better under understand and research what that looks like. I think we’ve gone through this sort of decade of really improving wellbeing resources that were sort of fit for purpose for that period of time, and we’ve come on leaps and bounds in that, but we almost now need to say now what’s the next phase? We can see that there are mental health crises in the younger generations coming down the line.

What do we now need to provide that might be different from what we have been providing in the past? And I think in addition to that, I would say we still need that culture shift. I think there is still that underlying hero culture, the sort of celebrating of the people that can work the longest hours and work through their lunch breaks. I still hear that and I think we do need to continually call it out and just say, actually the hero culture is the leader who says, right, I’m going off for my lunch break. This is my protected time. And make sure you do the same and who says, oh, I need to go and look after my kids because things have happened at home. And build in the flexibility to allow that for other team members as well. So actually modelling the fact that we are, that working life is a continuum and we do need to respect the fact that we need to eat, sleep, socialise, and recover properly in order to be sustained in the workplace and for longer. For longer.

Jack Peploe:

No, absolutely. Well, you’ve referenced another thing I really want to cover off, which is the parenthood element, something which I’m definitely learning at the moment, but through vet mums, you’ve obviously explored the challenges of parenting in the profession. What are some of the biggest barriers for working parents in veterinary medicine and how can practice better support them without losing that valuable talent?

Liz Barton:

So I think the number one thing really is just understanding and empathy. I think there are so many challenges that I hadn’t anticipated as a parent, which is why I originally set up vet moms and started talking about it. I think even from the point of conception and getting pregnant, the sort of challenges around that can be incredibly difficult within that small practice environment where clients are saying, oh, have you got kids and family? And if you are trying to have kids and then you’re also dealing with ionising radiation, you’ve got a stressful job, you’re dealing with chemotherapeutic drugs, et cetera. There are concerns around how best to manage that. So I think providing clear advice even at those early stages and just being sensitive to some of the challenges is really important. And then once people have families, again, just the complete mindset and perception shift that goes on.

All of a sudden you are at home for a period just all you’re doing is trying to get dressed in the morning and make sure everybody’s fed and alive in the evening. And going from a high octane professional role where you are constantly using your brain to literally just sort of changing nappies and getting food sorted and brushing your hair on a good day, there can be a bit of an identity shift around that. For some people, that’s a really challenging phase. And again, just being aware of that, preparing for it and having a bit of support and empathy around that. And then once you’re then into the juggle of balancing, returning to work, whatever that might look like, and childcare, there were huge financial issues around that. I mean, I went back two days a week. I worked out, if I’d have gone back three days a week, I would actually pretty much have broken even in terms of what I earned versus childcare. So I’d be cost neutral if I went back three days a week. My practice were desperate for me to, and I was like, well, I’m not going to go in and work at a nine hour day and make zero money. So that just doesn’t make sense.

So there are definitely financial challenges as well. And then obviously once you get into the school ages, just the incompatibility of the hours of school and obviously the school holidays, et cetera. Again, there’s a financial burden with outside of school clubs, but there’s also that pressure that we feel to be there for our kids when they come out of school or in the school holidays, which isn’t compatible with providing 24 7, 3 6 5 care for our patients. So I think the biggest challenge overall, bringing that all together is that we want to be perfect as vets, we want to be perfect as parents, we want to give a hundred percent of ourselves to our career and a hundred percent of ourselves to our family. We typically give 0% of ourselves to ourselves, but at the best, we can only give 50/50 or 60/40 or 70/30, and that never feels like enough. So I think the biggest thing really is that mindset of I constantly feel like I’m not good enough as a vet. I constantly feel like I’m not good enough as a parent because I’m never giving my all to either.

Jack Peploe:

Yeah, no, absolutely. And then we move on to the subject of menopause, and it’s finally getting the attention it deserves in workplace discussions, which is great. How does this impact retention and performance? And again, what changes need to happen to better support those going through it?

Liz Barton:

Yeah, I mean, interestingly, when I looked into this and I did a report on menopause in the ary profession in 2020, and there isn’t a kind of steep drop off between the perimenopause years, which are typically around 45-55, though it can happen outside of that much earlier in medically or surgically induced menopause, for example. But there’s not a sort of steep drop off in the number of practicing female vets. It’s a kind of steady decline across all age groups as we advance in age. But from doing the research, there were some really clear things that happened in that period that made it challenging for people. So we had a lot of qualitative testimonials come back of things like having to move from large to small animal practice because of things like joint pain, the challenges around sleeplessness for lone ambulatory working, for example, brain fog and impacting confidence and that causing people to maybe reduce their hours because that was just an additional stress and people stepping down from leadership roles, again, some of those sort of confidence issues and anxiety is one of the most common symptoms of menopause and can even be quite crippling.

And that just making people again sort of step away from some of the more senior roles and whether it was reducing hours shifting species or moving out of clinical practice altogether on some people actually moving out of the workplace altogether. There are definitely cross industry, so many studies showing that a lot of women impacted around this age will reduce their hours or move out of the workforce completely. And obviously being a female dominant profession at graduation and a largely male dominant profession at retirement, we need to do a lot more to support women in the workforce through those years.

Jack Peploe:

No, a hundred percent. Now obviously there’s a lot of exciting things happening within the veterinary profession and a lot of advancements in things like ai, telemedicine, and remote diagnostics. With everything that you’ve seen and worked on in the industry, what gives you hope for the future of veterinary medicine?

Liz Barton:

I think what gives me hope is people are now starting to really get involved in their discussions as a cohort. Veterinary professionals, vets, nurses, and I’d actually include the support teams, the practice managers, et cetera, have this tremendous skillset of compassion and empathy alongside solid scientific knowledge, interest people’s systems interest as well. And it’s a really powerful skillset. And I think once we get our teeth into and engaged in a topic, we have so much to bring to the discussion. One of the dangers can be the sort of business as usual, best practice life is so busy and just getting through the day to day can be challenging enough without saying now we have to future proof and predict and get into all of these additional conversations, discussions, thoughts around how we best utilise AI as an additional tool to make veterinary practice both patient outcomes, but also sustainability of team members to improve across the board.

But I am now seeing people starting to get more and more engaged and realise that this is incredibly important as a discussion as a whole field to start exploring how and when and why they should integrate AI increasingly both in clinical and nonclinical aspects of practice. And I think if we can really mobilise as a profession and almost invite the people that are developing the tech, a lot of the developers that I’ve spoken to are sort of people that have worked in Google and Amazon, et cetera, and have got pets that have gone, oh, it’d be great to do something to support animal health. And then they look at veterinary and they go, oh, there’s loads of efficiencies we could make there. So it’s really well-meaning well-intended people that quite often want to come in and support the industry and support care for their pets, but don’t necessarily understand what that looks like. They don’t have that veterinary background. So I think increasingly partnering with the tech developers inputting into what this technology should and could and should not do and could not do for veterinary practise and animal health, I think is the area that I’m most excited about making those connections and making sure that veterinary team members are getting involved in making AI work for in the future.

Jack Peploe:

Amazing. Well, Liz, what an absolutely fascinating conversation. I knew it was going to be the case. We didn’t quite get through all the things I wanted to, but that was so much good stuff. I ultimately think you’ve helped shine a light on some of the biggest challenges in the industry while also offering some real solutions and hope for the future, which is great. Now for anyone who’s listening who wants to follow your work or get involved in some of the initiatives that you’ve been part of, where’s the best place that they can connect with you?

Liz Barton:

So LinkedIn is great. I’m Liz Barton Vet, I think. Yeah, so connect with me on LinkedIn is great. I sort of post about most of what I’m doing on there for email, liz@wellvet.co do UK is great or feel free to reach out to me through the Vet Moms platform, which isn’t just for vet moms, it’s also for people within the veterinary industry that are interested in challenges of parenting in the profession. So if you’re involved in veterinary practice in any way, then I’d encourage you to get involved.

Jack Peploe:

Amazing. We’ll make sure, obviously everything’s on all the show notes, but it’s been a real pleasure having you on the podcast and I really truly appreciate the work you are doing for veterinary medicine to make it better, more sustainable for the profession, for everyone. So thanks again for joining me.

Liz Barton:

Thanks for having me.

Jack Peploe:

Every week we ask professionals and experts to suggest a best business resource for our listeners. This week’s recommendation is from Matt Madden,

Matt Madden:

So my recommended resource is Grow with Google, and they do have a specialist AI section within that. I think with all the noise and the excitement around ai, and we spoke about this in the podcast, it’s easy to get confused and overwhelmed by everything that’s going on. I think this platform gives you a great entry level and a guide to understand the basics of what AI can do, and you can give that to your team or it can just be for you as a business owner to use that and just get the fundamentals in place to understand how you can start to leverage these technologies to make the clinic more effective. It’s a free tool. It’s been developed with Google, and I just think it’s a great starting point for learning about where the technology is headed.

Jack Peploe:

Coming up next time, we welcome Dr. Lauren Jones, a veterinarian practice owner and director of veterinary medicine at Shepherd Veterinary Software. Lauren shares her journey from running two busy hospitals to reshaping her career around joy, balance, and technology that truly works for the people using it. We explore how she empowers teams, embraces change, and uses automation to free up time for meaningful patient and client communication. Lauren also dives into what makes practice culture thrive and how technology can support not replace the human heart of veterinary medicine,

Lauren Jones:

Finding those tech software solutions that really make you not think about it so that you can just back to being in the room and bringing that human component into your exam room. So I’m not worried about typing my notes and I’m not worried about forgetting all of these things. I can just bring my computer in there, push a button, and it captures all of physical exam findings, my conversation, my recommendations so that I don’t have to take that time. Our appointments are a half hour and I want the most of that going to benefit my patient and my client.

Jack Peploe:

That’s it for this episode. All links and recommendations we talked about are in the show notes. Don’t forget to subscribe and share the podcast if you found it useful. In the meantime, thanks for listening and see you next time.