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In this week’s episode:

• Human Factors Fill the Gap Between Knowing and Doing – In high-stakes fields like aviation and veterinary medicine, possessing technical skills isn’t enough. Human factors – like team dynamics, environment design, and leadership behaviour – are what bridge the gap between capability and consistent, high-quality outcomes.
• Break Culture: Changing the Narrative Around Wellbeing – A key challenge isn’t just creating space for rest – it’s normalising it. Even when breaks are possible, a culture of self-sacrifice and “heroism” can prevent teams from taking them. Human factors encourage embedding self-care into team norms as a requirement for good patient care, not a luxury.
• There Are No Simple Solutions to Complex Problems – Veterinary practice is inherently complex, and that means there’s rarely a single fix. The real path to safety, wellbeing, and efficiency lies in systemic thinking – tailoring multifaceted approaches grounded in science and collaboration.
• Veterinary Medicine Can Leap Ahead by Learning from Other Industries – With decades of research and application in aviation and healthcare, the veterinary field is poised to accelerate its progress by avoiding the missteps of others. There’s a chance now to define its own human factors journey – driven not by regulation, but by passion, people, and purpose.

Dan Tipney explores how applying the science of human factors – rooted in psychology, design, and systems thinking – can transform veterinary teams into safer, more resilient, and more sustainable workplaces.

Additional Guest Spotlights

• Recommend Resource: This week, Dr. Laura Jones recommends reminding ourselves how the right tools – whether it’s your practice management software or anything that supports your workflow – can make all the difference. For her, finding a good fit meant less stress at work and more time for family, and that’s what it’s all about.
• Next Episode Sneak Peak: Next episode, Aoife Smith, an ex-vet nurse turned psychotherapist, joins us for a powerful conversation on mental health in the veterinary world. She shares her own journey, practical tips for coping with emotional pressure, and why even something as small as making a great cup of tea can be a win on the toughest days.
  
  

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.
• Dan provides an array of insights into human performance gained from his perspective across numerous disciplines. Formally an international athlete, sports coach, pilot instructor, and airline pilot, he now delivers non-clinical training and support for veterinary teams.
• Dan led the Human Factors training programme at a major UK airline and has since developed and delivered non-clinical training to both veterinary and healthcare professionals.
• He represented Great Britain both as an athlete and a coach and has a great passion for supporting teams so that they can consistently achieve their goals.
• Across all fields, Dan has consistently identified that understanding ourselves as humans, both individually and collectively is the basis for delivering positive change.
• Since co-founding VetLed in 2016, Dan has collaborated with experts from veterinary medicine, aviation, psychology, and healthcare when developing training material, campaigns, patient safety tools, and cultural initiatives for veterinary teams.

Dan’s Recommendations:

• Steve Shorrock’s blog is a fantastic (free!) resource and has such a huge breadth of content across various sub-topics within the field of Human Factors – Humanistic Systems – Understanding and Improving Work & Life.
• Black Box Thinking by Matthew Syed
• Anything Brene Brown!
• Petra Agthe and the Vete Mind Works Podcast. Petra has great insight into our human emotions and needs, and speaks with sensitivity and compassion, sharing personal experiences of shame and vulnerability.
• And of course, make sure to check out all things VetLed here, and keep an eye out for upcoming events!

Transcription

Jack Peploe:

Coming up on the Modern Veterinary Practice,

Dan Tipney:

There’s a saying in human factors, and it’s probably not specific to human factors, but it’s often used that people often claim to have simple solutions to complex problems and they’re usually wrong or something along those lines because these are complex problems. Because a veterinary practice is a complex environment and complexity means that there’s probably not just one simple solution that one person needs to resolve. And so human factors are way of recognising that complexity.

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 Dan Tipney, co-founder and training director of VetLed to the podcast. We’ll be exploring how veterinary teams can learn from industries like aviation and healthcare to improve team wellbeing, patient safety, and reliable performance through the application of human factors from system design to leadership behaviours, we’ll dive into what veterinary practices can do to build a safer, more sustainable workplace while supporting their people to thrive

Dan Tipney:

Okay. Hello. So my name’s Dan Tipney. I’m the training director and one of the co-founders of VetLed and I’m one of the members of our team who originally come from a non-veterinary background. So I actually found my way into this field through the worlds of sport and aviation going back quite a few years. I was an athlete in the sport of rowing. I was very fortunate to get a chance to represent the Great Britain, the GB team. I was in a coach, so I coached athletes through from kids at school up to international competition. And then I had to make some decisions through injuries and different challenges about my career and I’d always wanted to fly. So I trained to be a pilot. I was a flying instructor for a few years and I was airline pilot for about 10 years.

And whenever we do any workshops or any work, I vet led and I sort of do that very brief intro and say, right, hands up if you’re confused about why I’m standing here right now, talking to you about whatever it is we’re doing that day. And the good thing is a lot of people are very honest and say, yeah, I’m confused. Why are you here? And so for me, drawing the link between those things and actually the work we do at BED led, which is all based around the field of human factors, is actually quite interesting because what I tried to do is highlight the fact that in all those things that I’ve done, whether it’s rowing, which is essentially the art going backwards in a boat, which always sounds quite funny when you say that, or whether it’s coaching or whether it’s fine planes actually the technical skills, the things you need to possess, whether it’s skills, knowledge, a part of the equation as it were.

So for example, with rowing, you need to have the technique for rowing. You need to know that well, you need to be strong and need to be fit. So you can physiologically do the task. And as a pilot, you need to know how to fly a plane, you need to know about wings and engines, you need to know all the information to pass the exams, to have a licence. And all those things are absolutely true. But one of the things that those two areas have done a lot to understand is actually what is the complete equation when it comes to high performance in aviation? Of course, consequences is safety within sport. The consequences whether or not, well, how fast you go backwards and therefore is the likelihood of winning. But what they found in these fields is that it isn’t, not surprisingly, it isn’t as simple as just having possessing those technical skills and the knowledge.

And for me, I became fascinated in this field of human factors, which for me is everything that bridges the gap metaphorically between having those skills and reliably achieving the outcomes you want to achieve or at least having the best chance of achieving those outcomes. Both those fields of international sport and commercial aviation have spent quite a long time really understanding the science around what bridges the gap. And because I had that interest and because I met my now wife, Ru, who when I first met her, had recently graduated as a vet talking about the application of this sort of field of human factors, which was something that I’d had the chance to work specifically in the airlines that I’ve worked for. We were talking a bit about how that is being applied because it’s been a journey that human healthcare has been on perhaps over the last 25 years.

And 10 years ago when I asked the question, when we started to look into it, it was quite limited at that point in terms of what was being done to apply these concepts. So really we started a journey to understand how that can be done or what that looks like within the veterinary space. And really, as I said over the last 10 years, we’ve built that. I bet that now fills that space as it were. And I hope that gives you a bit of a sense around, I suppose where I’m coming from and what I’m interested in, but also what we do and what we mean by this term. Human factors.

Jack Peploe:

Now, Dan, well look, welcome onto the Modern Veterinary Practice Podcast. It’s obviously fantastic to have you here. How are you today?

Dan Tipney:

Very good, thanks. Yes, it’s nearly a sunny day and North Yorkshire. I was about to say the sunshine. It was when I started, but it’s just gone away and yeah, all is well. Thank you.

Jack Peploe:

Good, good. Yeah, I can’t say the same thing. We’ve just got dark cloud, so I think I need to move. But look, your background is absolutely fascinating. You mentioned from representing Great Britain as an athlete to training airline pilots and now obviously moving on to co-founding with vet led to improve performance and culture in veterinary teams. Now I’m really excited to dive into your insights on human factors and how they apply to the veterinary profession and found it really fascinating about your transition of how you went into the veterinary space and what you felt that you could transition from and apply to the veterinary profession. But one thing I want to sort of hop onto just for clarity is obviously the concept of human factors, because I appreciate this might be new to some listeners. Can you explain what it means and why it’s so critical in high stake environments like veterinary medicine and also being an airline pilot?

Dan Tipney:

Yeah, absolutely. That’s a great question. Thank you. For me, we talk about human factors more as a field, the field or human factors rather than the human factors. And really it’s the study of, and sometimes it’s described as human-centered design, but essentially it’s an understanding of who we are as a species. And if we start with that, then from that point you can design everything that you do as much as possible based around that understanding. And whether that is the way in which you design your equipment, the interaction with that equipment, with your environment, the way you set up the spaces in which you work, and of course the training and the skills that are necessary because as well as the technical skills, it’s also the non-technical skills. So human factors is often split into a few different main areas. One is that they’re very much the design, the tasks of the environment of the equipment based upon an understanding of how our brains function, our emotional response to situations and the sort of ergonomics design that’s appropriate for our body and the way we work.

But then also the non-technical skills because historically that’s often been sort of branded as maybe softer skills or put in just a professional skills category. And it hadn’t perhaps been seen as a science that is based largely upon again, how we function at a cognitive and emotional level, and therefore the skills that are essential to allow people’s technical skills to be delivered as well as possible. So whether it’s about these untechnical skills, whether it’s about the design of the environment, essentially human factors is a whole area of work. As I said, it’s a field, it’s a study in itself that looks to apply that understanding for the purpose of I suppose, optimal system performance. A system in the context of what we’re talking about perhaps would be the performance, the functioning of a veterinary practice and the wellbeing of the team. That’s generally the two outcomes that the objectives for the field of human factors is the system performance and team wellbeing based upon a fundamental understanding of who we are as a species.

And that in some ways is a really simple thing, but is also not easy to describe. And that’s why I often come back to that analogy I used earlier, which is human factors is everything that sort of metaphorically fills the gap between technically knowing what you are doing as an individual or as a team technically having those things in place. And then in the other hand, how do we have the best chance of reliably achieving the outcomes you want to achieve? And for me, the way I picture it is human factors are all the things that metaphorically fill that gap, whether it is communication skills, team skills, leadership skills, decision making skills, whether it’s the way we design the integration of a system, even as something as simple as the way a switch moves because it’s all very well at a task level to say, well, yeah, but the label does say on and off. But if that doesn’t coordinate with how our brain will interpret that and therefore the chance of moving it the wrong way is quite high, then that isn’t set up. And often another way of people use to describe human factors making it easy to do the right thing.

And that again, could be the way we design things, the way we set things up, but it could also be the skills that we need beyond the technical skills as well. So it’s interesting how it’s in some ways a simple concept because quite often it can be described as the science of the bleeding obvious because a lot of the concepts within human factors can seem like obvious things, but actually are quite challenging to deliver and address effectively.

Jack Peploe:

No, a hundred percent, a hundred percent. And it leads quite nicely because one of the things I wanted to sort of pick on was one of the elements being wellbeing, and it’s a very prominent topic within veterinary considering often face burnout and compassion fatigue. What strategies or systems can help teams deliver reliable performance while preserving their mental and emotional wellbeing?

Dan Tipney:

Yeah, it’s a really good question because I think it’s an area where I think sometimes it’s easy to focus on what we want to achieve, and it’s sometimes harder to focus on how we get there. So it’s relatively easy. Most people would agree that we want people to be well, or we want people to have enough rest to take breaks, to have enough sleep, to eat well, to function in an environment where they feel safe. And so therefore, emotionally, their experience of their job every day is one that means that is conducive to being well. And those are things that people tend to agree on, but it’s surprisingly complex actually what we need to do to get there. So what’s interesting, for example, is if we look at one, which is a very common one, and one we talk about a lot is the subject of breaks and workload and what’s expected of people within a day.

Because we obviously need to manage what’s realistic in terms of what’s necessary for a free practise to be viable. And then we need to also ask the question, what are the needs of the people and how do we meet those needs? And there isn’t usually just a simple answer. It isn’t just simply people need to take more breaks or this practice needs to take on less clients. Maybe it is, and maybe just simply having longer consult blocks, but what if that’s just not viable to actually be a functioning practise? So very often what we actually need to do is look at what are the blocks, what is actually going on within that team? And very often that can be quite cultural. So it is going to be a combination perhaps of the rotors and the shifts and combinations of things that practically enable people to take the breaks, but it’ll probably also be a factor of what’s considered normal.

And so one of the things they found in healthcare is that even in situations where people have the opportunities to take breaks, because it’s a healthcare environment where everyone perceive the patient needs to come above the team needs, no one wants to be the first person that was perceived to not put their patient needs first. And even when the opportunity was there to take breaks, people didn’t take their breaks, it wasn’t culturally normal, and there was a, no one explicitly said it’s a good thing to have a superhero mentality. At the same time it was acknowledged it was there. And so it actually took quite a few years, even though it’s a simple thing to get teams together to actually say, what would it look like if we considered self-care? The willingness to not prioritise. I think the word prioritise is often misused. So it’s not about saying put your needs above the needs of the people of the team, but to consider the subject of self-care for yourself and for the whole team as a quality that is essential for delivering great patient care.

And that’s a really simple question, but it took a long time for people to actually really positively engage with that. So I’ll say it again. One of the things they said was what would it look like if self-care and a focus approach on wellbeing within the team was seen as an essential quality of delivering effective patient care? And what that basically meant was that there was a chance to collectively understand what that might look like. And so for example, when you’ve got a day where nothing’s gone quite right, people have called in sick emergencies have come in, things are taking longer, IT systems perhaps aren’t working as they want them to, autoclave is broken, all these different things that can happen, that’s the day, that’s the moment. And this perhaps is where we’ll see this associated with leadership. Someone in a lead role brings people together and acknowledge that and say, this is a really challenging situation.

We want to make sure we’ve managed this as best we can. And one of the ways we’re going to do that is by making sure that we look after ourselves and each other as well as we can in this situation, what’s that going to look like? So that the very first thing that is said and discussed is in the situation with the limitations of what’s going on, what are the ways that we’re going to make sure we look after ourselves as best we can in this situation because that’s the way we’re going to deal with this as best we can. And the person in that lead role puts themselves in that equation. They don’t put themselves outside at saying, I’m going to look after you and sacrifice myself. And they don’t pull rank. They consider themselves as part of that equation. And what they found is that when those become habits, when those become norms, when those conversations become just embedded as not as, when we talk about culture, like the way we do things around here, it means that when those events occur, those responses actually involve people finding those opportunities to look after themselves in best ways they can.

Rather than it being seen as, well, I don’t want to be seen as the lazy one today when we’ve got all these challenges. So no one’s going to have a break. And there’s a review of, there’s an opportunity to gather insights from everyone to understand what combination of rotors and shifts and length of consults and all the things in a way that is achieved, that’s consistent with what the practice needs to achieve. And that is a very process-based concept. But a lot of the time people need the, it’s helpful to have some of the science around some of these topics so that when we recognise that if we work for five hours or more without at least a 20 minute, but obviously that’s not optimal, but at least 20 minutes away from a task, our chance of error goes up significantly. So factoring that into the equation, what does that look like?

So we absolutely avoid that situation wherever we can. What’s the trigger to make sure that we collectively recognise that as a team? So we share the responsibility the team have a partner responsibility, but of course the practice and the management team in terms of the systems and everything else also have a responsibility, but it’s a science-based concept. It’s not a nice to have, it’s not a luxury. So human factors is about bringing that science, bringing that understanding, and then understanding how you embed the norms and being realistic about how much effort and work it takes. Because it comes back to what I said earlier, these seem like simple concepts. People should take their breaks. So it’s like on that basis, it’s like, okay, great. Well, I’m glad we paid someone to come and run a workshop on that, for example. But actually, when you think about all those things I described and the fact that within NHS trust they found it’s taken months or even years to actually change the norms to understand what systemic factors can actually be changed that will enable people to be able to take their breaks more easily.

Because there’s a saying in human factors, and it’s probably not specific to human factors, but it’s often used that people often claiming to have simple solutions to complex problems, and they’re usually wrong or something along those lines because these are complex problems because veterinary practice is a complex environment and complexity means that there’s probably not just one simple solution that one person needs to resolve. And so human factors is a way of recognising that complexity. So I suppose in some way, that long answer really acknowledges that there isn’t just one answer, but we do need to take a very human, human-centered approach, people with science, get people talking, but also recognise the responsibility from at a systemic level, but also at a human, individual and team level.

Jack Peploe:

So looking forward now, what excites you most about the future of veterinary medicine and the role of nonclinical training in shaping that future?

Dan Tipney:

Yeah, I think what’s so exciting is that we’ve got the opportunity to benefit from all the work that’s been done over many decades. So the application of human factors in aviation, for example, dates back to, I suppose mostly the early 1980s perhaps, where there was a series of fairly high profile accidents that led to a huge project between NASA and different airlines, different universities that went on for the best part of a decade. And actually what that resulted in is by the early nineties, the application of human factors, particularly in terms of developing non-technical skills, but actually another area too, became a mandatory part of aviation training and also the way that aircraft and standard operation procedures and checklists and all these things are designed. So you’ve got all that the of that and actually the application, a lot of those concepts in healthcare has now been going on fairly explicitly for about 25 years, particularly in terms of the relationship with patient safety.

So in the uk, the National Patient Safety Agency was formed in 2001, I think, and that largely based upon the application of human factors concepts. So what’s really exciting is, although this is relatively new, I would say it’s perhaps been discussed explicitly in veterinary for the last 10 years perhaps, but we’re really now seeing the last few years of a real shift in the number of people studying PhDs or doing masters, and specifically looking at the application, these within veterinary, the number of practices willing to voluntarily embark on a human factors journey. We’ve got the opportunity to learn from all the insights, particularly from the way that human factors was applied in healthcare and the mistakes that were made, and then figure out what that looks like. One of the challenges that was they found in healthcare was that you can’t just cut and paste.

You can’t say that’s what happens on a plane. That’s what should happen in hospital. Someone called Martin Bromley, who was actually keynote speaker at our first veterinary human practice conference back in 2021, Nelson Bromley started the Clinical Human Factors Group based upon a very tragic event involving the death of his wife when she was being anaesthetised for a procedure. And he’s also a pilot. And the developments of the Clinical Human Factors group was a real key part of this application for human facts in veterinary. When he spoke at the conference, at the Veterinary Human Factors Conference, he talks about this journey, the word that’s been on all the lessons, what they thought it would be like, what it was actually like, and some great analogies that he used. And he said, you’ve got the benefit of all that and your journey’s going to be different to that, but you absolutely have the chance to benefit from our research, from our evidence base and from the things that haven’t gone well.

And veterinary won’t achieve the application of human factors most likely through regulation like aviation did. Now, that is a strength and a challenge. It’s a challenge because aviation had this international opportunity to say, all airlines must do it this way. If you want to have paying passengers on board your aircraft, this is one of the things you now must do. There’s a strength. But that does also mean that it’s not being unwillingly, perhaps healthcare perhaps in the middle, because in the uk, of course, through the NHS, there is some higher regulation perhaps in jurisdiction over people and organisations and in veterinary, yes, there are ways of achieving that, but it’s not unlikely to be done in achieved purely in that way. But what we’re seeing is an interest because whether it’s because practice want to understand how they can retain and attract people, the people that they want to be in their teams, whether it’s because of the genuine interest in the health and the wellbeing of people in their teams, which I’m seeing a lot of, and it’s easier I think, to see certain negatives around perceptions of management, but I’m seeing a lot of people in those roles who have a genuine passion, recognise the limitations they’re currently up against, but really want to figure that out.

And we have a lot of people wanting to champion this within their practices because they want to reduce the risk of avoidable harm to their patients. And I think that’s the opportunity. We’ve got the chance to do this because people want to do it because we can benefit from the journey that other professions have been on, and we can do that in our own way and we can develop our own evidence base. And that’s all happening right now. And I honestly think when we have this conversation again in 10 years, I don’t know exactly what that journey’s going to be like, but we’ll be able to reflect on that I think in quite an exciting, interesting way. So,

Jack Peploe:

No, that’s awesome. Well, Dan, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today. I can’t believe how quickly that’s gone. I’ve still got probably 101 more questions for you, so we’re definitely going to have to get you back on. But the insights into the human factors and how they can transform veterinary teams and also looking at what that could look like and where we’re going is fascinating. Now, for anyone who’s wanting to learn more about vet led or explore the resources you provide, where’s the best place for them to find you? All the resources?

Dan Tipney:

Yeah, I mean, our website, vet led.co uk has got all the information about who we are, what we do, services and ways of getting in touch and ways of booking onto certain workshop and courses that are available in that way. We do run our Veterinary Human Factors conference every year, which is usually in February, and that’s an online to virtual conference that we vary every year in terms of the themes and the focus that hopefully make it as accessible as possible to everybody. And we also run other events such as we run the veterinary patient safety, or we’re involved in running the Veterinary Patient Safety Forum, which is a monthly online event that anyone can attend to, which is specifically looking at the application of human factors to improve patient safety. And then as well as that, we also run an annual Veterinary Patient Safety summit, which is an in-person event related to that series, which again, all the information is available through our website through contacting us. So yeah, I’m pleased to get in touch. We’d love to hear from you.

Jack Peploe:

Cool. Well done. It’s been a real pleasure having you on the show, and I’m sure our listeners have taken away plenty of action ideas, so thank you so much, and I hope to catch up again soon. Great, thanks, Jack.

Jack Peploe:

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

Laura Jones:

So hands down, it’s been my software and I never, 10 years ago, I probably wouldn’t have thought this until I found the tools that really work for me in my practice. And hands down, that’s Shepherd. The software was founded by a veterinarian who really just said, Hey, there’s got to be a better way to do this. And she was right. And we still carry her mission of bringing joy to the veterinary industry on a daily basis, but finding the right software that works for our workflows really streamlines our day-to-day process, making us more efficient so that we can really get back to our families. So obviously, it’s about patient care and doing that as efficiently as possible and with joy in the clinic, but it’s about joy at home too. And finding the right software tools really allowed me to be the best veterinarian that I can be. But then I can also get home to the family dinner, and I cannot miss my kids’ soccer games and ballet recitals and all of those things. I think that’s been a game changer for me, for sure.

Jack Peploe:

Coming up next week, we welcome Aoife Smith, an ex-veterinary nurse turned psychotherapist, who is on a mission to improve mental health and wellbeing in the veterinary profession. In this deeply personal episode, Eva shares her journey from practice to psychotherapy and offers practical strategies to help individuals and teams better navigate the emotional pressures of veterinary life. We explore the systemic challenges that contribute to mental health struggles, how to spot the signs that someone might be silently suffering, and what leaders and colleagues can do to build a more supportive and psychologically safe environment.

Aoife Smith:

I think if you can identify one thing today that you did well, force yourself to identify that one thing, find that one thing. And even if it’s a terrible day in practice and you’ve had a really, really bad day at work, it doesn’t even have to be procedure owner, pet related, if you made the perfect cup of tea this morning. That’s it.

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.