Podcast - Why do psychologically informed veterinary workplaces matter?

Intro

Abi Judd-English (00:24)

Hi everyone, and welcome to the September edition of the RCVS Podcast, where we talk to you about everything going on at the College, explaining why we do what we do, how we do it, and how we can all work together as we continue to support the advancement of the veterinary professions. I'm Abi Judd-English, a member of the RCVS Communications Team, and we've got some great guests lined up for today's episode who are going to be talking to us all about the importance of psychologically informed veterinary workplaces.

For our main feature, our Projects Implementation Manager, Tash Goodwin Roberts, chats to Professor Elinor O'Connor, Dr. Kevin Teoh, and Professor Jason Spendelow about their work in this area, including Elinor and Kevin's research into organisational interventions to support wellbeing in veterinary workplaces funded by our Mind Matters Initiative.

In the second part of the podcast, we'll be discussing another Mind Matters research project with our Director for the Advancement of the Professions and Mind Matters Initiative, Angharad Belcher, who will be talking to our latest grant recipients, Dr John Tulloch and Dr. Tamzin Furtado about their project exploring mental health and trauma support after severe occupational injury.

But first, we have our usual news roundup.

Abi Judd-English (01:45)

Professor Anna Meredith and Dr. Emma Milne have been successfully re-elected to continue their roles on the RCVS Fellowship Board, which governs the Fellowship in its mission to promote scientific excellence, further professional skills and practice, and enrich public discourse on the importance of veterinary science. Professor Meredith will continue in her role as Chair of the Science Advisory Panel, while Dr. Milne will continue as Projects and Engagement Officer.

On the tenth of September, we held a research webinar to mark World Suicide Prevention Day. Our Changing the Narrative on Veterinary Suicide webinar featured research presentations from international expert guests and explored common myths and misconceptions around suicide, how data, potential risk, and lived experience can be used to better understand suicide in the veterinary professions, and how individuals, teams, and workplaces can contribute to meaningful change.

For those who couldn't attend the session, a recording will be made available on the RCVS website, a link to which is in the show notes.

If you're looking to bank some free CPD this autumn, our online learning platform, the RCVS Academy, is continuing to host a range of online academy live events based on its course content such as an introduction to mentorship and welcoming team members returning to the professions.

And don't forget, our Academy is free to access and is available on demand, with a whole host of courses available designed to support your professional development. To access the Academy, simply log in via your MyRCVS account.

On the fourteenth of October, we're taking our regional question time event to York, where you can join colleagues for a buffet supper and chat to our RCVS officers and staff in an informal setting about the issues currently impacting the veterinary team. This is your evening and it will be shaped by your questions to the College. It's free to attend and you can sign up via our website.

For more information on these news stories and events, take a look at the show notes where we've provided links to our news and events pages.

Interview with Professor Elinor O'Connor, Dr Kevin Teoh, and Professor Jason Spendelow

Tash Goodwin Roberts (03:45)

Hi everyone, my name's Tash Goodwin Roberts, and I'm the Projects Implementation Manager here at the RCVS. My work mainly sits within the College's Workforce Project, which looks at how we can support recruitment, retention, and return across the veterinary professions. I'm really, really pleased to be joined today by three excellent guests for a conversation about psychologically informed veterinary workplaces.

What that means in practice, why it matters, and how it can support people and teams across the veterinary professions. First, we have Professor Elinor O'Connor and Dr. Kevin Teoh, who received the Mind Matters Impact Grant in 2025 for their project exploring organisational interventions to support wellbeing in veterinary workplaces.

We are also joined by Professor Jason Spendelow, who is Professor of Clinical Psychology and Professional Practice at Harper and Keele Veterinary School. A very warm welcome. Thank you so much for being here. Just to get us started, could I ask each of you to just say a little bit about yourselves and your work? I think if we can start with Elinor and then come to Kevin and then Jason, please.

Professor Elinor O'Connor (04:52)

Hi Tash. So I'm a professor of occupational psychology at the University of Manchester, and I've been working with the veterinary profession and the RCVS in particular for several years now, focused on the topic of wellbeing in the veterinary workplace.

Tash Goodwin Roberts (05:08)

Lovely, thank you, Kevin.

Dr Kevin Teoh (05:09)

Hi Tash, hi everyone, so I'm Kevin, I'm a reader and work in organisational psychology at Birkbeck University of London and really what I'm interested in is how workplaces are designed, organised and managed and what impact that then has on the health and wellbeing of individuals within those environments.

Professor Jason Spendelow (05:23)

And I'm Jason. So I trained as a clinical psychologist and still work as a clinical psychologist, but many years ago became quite interested in psychological strategies applied to the workplace. And from there became very interested in the organisation as a whole and psychologically informed or psychologically healthy workplaces.

Tash Goodwin Roberts (05:43)

That's really helpful context. It would be quite useful to start sort of with the basics, because the term psychologically informed can sound quite technical if people haven't come across it before. So just thinking about stress and workplace environments in a nutshell, when we talk about psychological health and wellbeing at work, what are we really talking about and what does that mean? For a workplace to be psychologically informed, particularly in a veterinary context?

Professor Jason Spendelow (06:07)

Yeah, so for me, the concept of a psychologically healthy workplace or veterinary practice is one where the everyday conditions, the practices, the leadership priorities actively support staff wellbeing, while also thinking about what does good performance look like. So treating the two as like mutually reinforcing or complementary goals rather than competing goals. And in that kind of spirit, think about both the demands that a job places on someone as well as the resources that an organisation can provide. And the extent to which someone is well at work or has good wellbeing - it tends to be a balance between those completing kind of demands and resources that we see in the workplace.

Professor Elinor O'Connor (06:47)

I think if I'm going to add to that too, you use the term sort of psychologically informed. And I think that's fundamentally thinking about the evidence base, actually, for the sort of approaches we're taking to trying to address stress and promote wellbeing specifically in the workplace. And of course, we all are aware that there's growing interest in the topic of wellbeing in the public eye generally. And of course, people have commented on that particularly being an issue post the COVID pandemic. And so it's great that people are discussing wellbeing in more detail and people are being more open about their experience of stress in promoting their own wellbeing. But of course, what we do see in the mainstream press is there are some ideas out there about how you can promote wellbeing. And actually, there isn't necessarily an evidence base to support that. So I think the focus we would have, is we're looking at wellbeing in the workplace, but particularly we want to look at approaches for which there is a research base, an evidence base, confirming the effectiveness of those interventions, and also the importance of how they're implemented to ensure their effectiveness.

Dr Kevin Teoh (07:51)

Just building on what Jason and Elinor have just said, I guess taking a step back, really, it's firstly recognising that we spend so much of our time in around work that it has an impact, both positive and negative. So I think we have a responsibility to understand how work affects us in a good way, but also potentially in a harmful way. As Elinor said, what's the evidence to that? How do we measure and understand what is happening and then crucially then gives us the basis to try and do something to support our colleagues working in such environments.

Tash Goodwin Roberts (08:23)

Brilliant, thank you. And that leads really nicely into the next area that I think it would be for us to explore. A lot of wellbeing support does focus on the individual. So we talk about things like resilience, coping strategies, and accessing support when things do become difficult. Those are all really important and valuable things, but there's a balance there between that and and the work that you're currently focusing on, which looks at organisational approaches and interventions. So do you mind talking us through what we mean by an organisational approach here and why that's important to look at alongside the individual person and the interventions that might be appropriate in that regard.

Professor Elinor O'Connor (09:00)

Yeah, I think certainly if we look at the idea of stress management in the workplace particularly, and promoting wellbeing at work, there are, as you've mentioned, Tash, there are two broad approaches to addressing these issues. The first one is what we might call the organisational approach. And the idea there is the focus is really on a if you like prevention rather than cure.

So we're trying to change working arrangements, reduce or remove, if we can, potential sources of stress at work, or to try and lessen the impact of those sources of stress on individuals. So that's the organisational approach.

The alternative approach is what we call the individual approach or individual interventions. And here, we're trying to promote people's resilience, we're trying to make individuals more resistant to or better able to withstand the impact of the stress they're facing at work. So those are two quite distinctive, arguably complementary approaches. I think what's interesting is that some people have this sense that there's something fundamentally wrong with an individual intervention. So, in other words, it should be an organisation's responsibility to ensure that they're preventing or trying to reduce sources of stress in the first place, rather than, in a sense, putting the onus onto the individual to withstand those sources of stress. And we can have some sympathy with that argument. However, what we need to remember is that.

Although ideally, yes, we should be trying to prevent sources of stress at work, or we should be trying to reduce those sources of stress, there is a lot to be said for those individual approaches as well. And partly that is in the very simple sense that there are some sources of stress at work that people face that we cannot do anything about. They're fundamentally built into the work people do.

And one of the classic ones in the context of veterinary work is essentially working with animal owners. That's an inevitable feature of your work when you are a vet. It's not something that we can necessarily eradicate as a source of stress. And therefore it's quite appropriate to focus on individual interventions to try and help people cope better with those specific sources of stress.

Tash Goodwin Roberts (10:58)

That's great. And Jason, is it okay to come to you on this as well for your take?

Professor Jason Spendelow (11:02)

Yeah, no, absolutely. And adding to that, when we look at organisational level interventions, ideally what we're trying to do is get the environment right in the first place, so people don't run into significant wellbeing issues down the track. And we're looking at really the sources of stress that we have some say over, we have some influence over.

And as Elinor said, many professions are inherently stressful, and there's this source of stress that you can't kind of avoid. But an organisational approach says, well, which of these sources of stress can we have some positive impact over? And look to, in a very structured, planned way, try and address those on an ongoing basis rather than a kind of a one-off interventional project as well. And then we look at individual level interventions for the more specific sources of stress say that are impairing people's kind of wellbeing. And so putting the individual and organisational level approaches together, so you have a package of kind of options. So you're not over relying on one or the other, or you're not inappropriately trying to apply one level of those interventions to an issue where the other one is better suited.

Dr Kevin Teoh (12:09)

If I can just add a couple of points to what we've just heard over there. I think one of the things when we talk about encouraging an organisational approach, is we often see a big emphasis on that individual approach, which is really important, but we have to make sure when we talk about holistic perspective that we have both the individual and the organisational. Not only is that good practice, but actually from a legal perspective, the law is clear that the onus and the responsibility is on the employer to create a safe and conducive work environment for individuals. We need to look at both together and not emphasise one necessarily over the other.

Tash Goodwin Roberts (12:46)

Yeah, thank you. It sounds like we're all sort of on the same page there. We really do need a balanced approach, and that's going to be unique and individual depending on the workplace and the individuals within that workplace. I'm gonna come back to you, Kevin, if I might, because I'd like to talk a little bit more about the research that you and Elinor are doing at the moment, which was funded by the MMI Impact Grant, what led you to focus on organisational wellbeing interventions within veterinary? And beyond that, can you tell us a bit more about the project and what you're exploring?

Dr Kevin Teoh (13:12)

Yeah, of course. And maybe actually if I take a step back and talk a bit about some of the other research that we've been involved in in this space. I think when we talk about organisational interventions, that we've just heard really is about creating better working environments. And Jason used the term reducing demands and increasing resources. And really that's what we want to try and do. So what are demanding aspects of the job? And that might be things like time pressure, bullying in the workplace, conflict, long working hours, basically different aspects of how the work environment is set up. And really what we want to do is to try and reduce those inherently demanding and challenging aspects of the work environment. And alongside that is then asking the question, how do we build resources within that environment? So how do we help individuals cope with the environment? But also, again, the research evidence is clear that giving people control, giving people autonomy, giving people support go a really long way in terms of helping them manage their work environments. And that is all associated with better health and wellbeing outcomes. And we've looked at this in a number of different sectors. I've done a lot of work, particularly in the NHS, looking at healthcare workers, where the challenge has always been, yes, obviously this makes sense, but it's impossible. Right? Healthcare is such that demands are high, resources, non-existent.

And we want a chance to challenge some of this perception and we've been looking at examples of good practice where people actually have changed their work environment. And that's looking at better processes, looking at better support systems, looking at changing the way they work, and whether that is shift patterns, looking at annualised working hours, flexible work, and all of this fundamentally to challenge this assumption to say this is how work is done, but really to take a step back and say, how do we reduce demands? How do increase resources? And that is, I think, something which then we're exploring now here in the veterinary space and very much in a similar vein. And I think I'll hand over to Elinor who can explain a little bit more.

Professor Elinor O'Connor (15:07)

Yeah, I think with the organisational interventions project in the veterinary workplace that Kevin and I are currently running. We're part way into this. We are collecting our data. And we are seeking examples and exploring examples specifically from the veterinary sector, veterinary workplaces, of organisational interventions that have been put in place to try and help manage stress and promote wellbeing. And we want to get real-life examples of what people have done in the workplace, get their experience of what was involved in implementing those approaches, what worked, you know, with hindsight, what they might do differently, what challenges they faced.

And it is as Kevin made that comment a few moments ago about that experience from the human healthcare sector. The demands are enormous, the resources are limited. So how on earth can we possibly begin to tackle this? And therefore we're focused very much on trying to get people's real life experiences of putting these interventions in place.

As I say, we're at the state now where we're collecting our data, And it has really been fascinating looking at some of the case studies from the veterinary sector. And a few things that emerge from it is that first of all, when people are putting interventions in place, they wouldn't necessarily formally call those interventions. Sometimes it's about, you know, we've got this issue at work. Can we just go and change that or or tweak that?

They're not necessarily setting out in a very formal way to say this is an intervention, we need to plan this, you know, we need to coordinate and so on. So very often things people are doing things quite organically. And yet, from our perspective as psychologists, we would say they are very definitely organisational interventions. Because what it's endeavouring to do is address something at work that's an issue, that's creating demands for people.

And if we can target those demands, that would be great. So, one example is very interestingly, a group of people in administrative roles in a veterinary hospital. Kevin and I have been seeking to look at interventions that involve a whole range of different members of the veterinary team. So it's not just focused on the clinical team. We're also looking at people who are in sport roles, administrative roles, and so on. And this particular example, I think it's a fantastic example, where an administrative team, they said, right, let's come together and let's look at these administrative processes that we have to carry out on a routine daily basis in our roles. And actually, can we simplify these? Because sometimes we're doing things that create extra work, or we're doing nugatory work. And can we simplify the processes? So immediately it's reducing demand, it's reducing workload. But what was so positive and so compelling about this particular approach was that they involved the team actively in saying, let's get together, let's share our views, how might we do this differently? Giving people that sense of autonomy. I now have some say in how my work is organised. I can make suggestions about how work can be organised better. So by definition, not only are you tackling the demand, are you reducing the nugatory work that you might be doing.

But importantly you're increasing people's sense of control and autonomy. And that in itself, we know is is really positive for people's sense of wellbeing.

Tash Goodwin Roberts (18:14)

Yeah, I think that's a really powerful example. And it's interesting how it highlights how people are already doing these things without necessarily connecting those dots. Because I think we all, you know, if we're in a positive team and have connection and that community, we're always kind of trying to do best for each other and have each other's backs. And I think that's certainly from my perspective something that's really, common within the veterinary sector. I think there are some really strong teams out there. So yeah, that's a really lovely example.

Professor Elinor O'Connor (18:39)

Just to build on that comment, Tash. What I also think is interesting too is what Kevin and I are picking up through this work, is that very often people are setting out to change how work is organised in some way or to have some intervention at work. And sometimes the purpose of that intervention isn't necessarily immediately focused on wellbeing. It's about doing things in a more streamlined way or improving performance in some way. But as an added-on benefit, it's supporting wellbeing. And we have another example of a veterinary workplace where they introduced a measure to try and understand and reduce the occurrence of specifically medication errors. Now clearly the focus of that was on patient safety. But what it has also provided as an added bonus is a huge sense of people feeling supported when something has gone wrong for them at work or they've had a near miss, which of course may you know have an impact on their own perspective on themselves as a professional. So it's not just about learning about how you reduce the occurrence of things like medication errors. People feel actually I can be open about this, creating that psychological safety. I feel supported when I can talk to other people about how I came close to making a mistake and managed to recover it. So not necessarily just about that explicit focus on wellbeing in the first instance.

Dr Kevin Teoh (19:54)

Just to pick up on that and to emphasise how everything is interconnected. And I think Elinor quite nicely put an example of care outcomes and and how that's a positive impact on staff wellbeing. Because actually, if we don't look at how everything is connected, the opposite can also happen. And and what we also see is that big emphasis, for example, to reduce wait times or to increase patient satisfaction sometimes actually come at the expense of staff by asking them to work longer or harder and faster.

So actually taking a step back and say, what's the ramifications of this process that we are putting into place? Because fundamentally, a lot of interventions that we are talking about might not be labelled a health and wellbeing intervention, but it's actually about creating a change. And what we're saying is that if we are going to create a change, can we take a step back and say, well, what impact will this have on staff working in this environment, on the animals, on the animal owners and and so forth?

Tash Goodwin Roberts (20:44)

That's another really interesting example, isn't it? Because it shows that something that could potentially be seen as coming down from above and being quite authoritarian and we must make this change for patient safety. But actually the way that it's positioned and the interactions that you have with your colleagues and your teams can actually turn it into something that's really empowering and still achieves that positive clinical outcome.

Jason, I'd really like to bring you in here if that's okay, to talk a little bit more about the work that you're doing. So you're looking at the PHO model, PHO standing for psychologically healthy organisations, as well as the organisation health improvement questionnaire or OHIQ, lots of acronyms. So, I understand that you are developing the PHO model yourself.

Could you tell us a bit more about that and what led you to develop it?

Professor Jason Spendelow (21:28)

Yeah, the PHO model, the psychologically healthy organisations or practices model, was our kind of framework at the vet school for really driving our performance and wellbeing strategic theme. And one of the really big projects out of this work is the OHIQ, the Organisational Health Improvement Questionnaire. And this is really a way to characterise or profile your veterinary practice in terms of organisational psychological health. Because we mentioned psychologically informed organisations, practices at the top of the discussion. And the OHIQ kind of exists because psychologically informed really starts with knowing where you actually stand. And organisations often intervene on guesswork. And the OHIQ it's a measure that gives it a diagnostic picture or kind of profile, then let's actually target interventions where the data says the problems are from a job demands and jobs kind of resources perspective. So, there are other kind of measures, other ways to think about, other ways to kind of characterise organisational psychological health, psychosocial safety climate available. But there's a lot of pretty long, unwieldy kind of surveys, kind of questionnaires that, you know, a practice is just not going to realistically be able to complete once, let alone on an ongoing basis. So we tried to create a very brief, scientifically valid measure. And this one takes just five minutes and it really helps to profile an organisation or practice and get them to think about well, where are the real pinch points? Where are the real opportunities for improving the psychological health of our organisation and therefore the wellbeing and the performance of our staff in terms of the demands that we're placing on people's an organisation and the resources that we're providing for them.

So without sounding like I'm on an infomercial that’s kind of the measure of the project in a nutshell. And having worked as a clinical psychologist for many years and working with people on an individual basis, time and time again I've seen that at least, part of what's driving the difficulties they come to me with are bigger picture, environmental kind of factors. And so I was very, very keen to think about how we could in a very doable way for a practice actually kind of profile where your organisational psychological health is with an actual profile. So we can say, here are the next logical steps that we can take here in order to improve the wellbeing of staff and get some those win-win benefits in terms of practice kind of performance and functioning on top of that.

Tash Goodwin Roberts (23:54)

Yeah, I think people generally like to be able to work from an evidence base. I think that within the professions, that's definitely something that's highly valued. So I think this is going to be something that people are going to really find useful. From your perspective, what would you hope that employers, managers, teams, what what would you hope they take from this work that you're doing right now?

Professor Jason Spendelow (24:10)

What I want organisations to take from this that it is very possible and potentially quite a positive productive kind of exercise or process to be very explicitly, deliberately trying to assess, measure the psychological health of your organisation and commit to doing that as an ongoing project for the purposes of continually trying to maximise staff wellbeing.

As well as have a successful kind of organisation regardless of the industry that you're in. And rather this being kind of a fearful exercise, you're going to have problems in your organisation whether you try and measure them or characterise them or not. They're there. So, with all the resources that get poured into staff wellbeing, performance improvements, it really, really makes sense to try and use a robust method of seeing where your big improvement opportunities are before you start really putting a lot of resources, a lot of money into those improvement efforts. So I think for me that's the really key take home and message that I'd want practices and practice managers and owners to take.

Tash Goodwin Roberts (25:16)

Yeah, not not putting the cart before the horse to use that old adage. I think we could probably talk at length about some of this, but I think what I'm hearing is there's some really strong links between all of the work that you do, understanding workplace wellbeing at an organisational level and helping teams to identify where that meaningful change might be needed.

If I may, I'd like to come to each of you just to kind of ask from your own perspective, what do you feel that veterinary workplaces most need to understand about psychological health and wellbeing, being psychologically informed? Can I come to Elinor first, please?

Professor Elinor O'Connor (25:48)

I think one of the important considerations that we see is a need to make wellbeing part of what we might call business as usual. So it shouldn't be just a bolt on something we do when we've got a bit of spare time. Or what's perhaps even worse is where we see in some organisations where there's a sense of, we're doing this just because we have to be seen to be doing it. It's a tick box exercise. Very often it's about incorporating wellbeing into business as usual on an everyday routine basis. That means having an environment where people feel they can talk about wellbeing, where it is the norm to ask people about how they're doing, just to be generally open about wellbeing and the resources that might be available to people to support them, whether in fact they feel they need those resources or not.

So it's just saying, look, these things are there, and I think that builds on what we see in, the published research evidence. There's there's very clear evidence from research that it is the implementation process that is often key to the success of the intervention. The intervention has to work, it has to be an evidence-based intervention, but ensuring that employees feel that they can participate in the implementation, that there's sort of general buy-in, particularly from the leadership of the organisation, for that intervention.  

And I think in the study that Kevin and I are doing at the moment, what's interesting is that people are saying what matters is the fact that you devote a bit of time to the intervention. you make you make the intervention something you do on a daily or regular basis.

Staff are involved in having a say, which is creating that sense of autonomy, creating that sense of people feeling they're part of a team that they're supported. You're reducing the demands, but you're enhancing the resources at the same time.

Dr Kevin Teoh (27:26)

For me, I think it's just recognising that wellbeing is everyone's responsibility. I think hopefully one of the takeaways over here is that wellbeing is not just a health intervention per se, but it's actually how is work designed, how it's organised, how it's managed. So it's not just about HR, the wellbeing champion or specific managers responsible for it. And I think going back to the point that we talked about earlier in the podcast, how do we reduce demands and increase resource and often a simple way to work with teams is to say if we can change one thing that will make an improvement to how we work, what would that be? And that could be a change to, team meetings, to process, how we interact with patients, etc. But recognising that change is possible and also that fundamentally it's an ongoing process. I think when an organisation or a team says, yep, we've got a strategy, we're sorted, you're not recognising that the work environment is dynamic, and we never get interventions right. So it'll always be an ongoing process. This is one issue that we're struggling with. We want to try and improve it. It might make a little bit of a difference. So what do we learn from this process? What can we do better the next time? Or if you know things are working really well, what's another issue that perhaps we want to try and address and improve over here? Start somewhere small and then go from there.

Professor Jason Spendelow (28:39)

And another reason why Elinor correctly says that this wellbeing of staff should be business as usual rather than bolt-on is that there's a really clear business case for this, if nothing else. You look at a range of outcomes, clinical performance, safety, staff retention, organisational commitment. These things tend to improve when staff wellbeing improves.

So if nothing else, that is a very good reason to be serious about organisational psychological health. And when we look at the organisational level and look at these kind of primary or preventative interventions, they tend to have the biggest impact on downstream.

Tash Goodwin Roberts (29:18)

Excellent. Thank you all I found that really insightful. Unfortunately, although we could talk all day, we are going to start running out time in just a moment. So I'm really keen to hear from you about what happens next with your work, what you're expecting coming up and how people can get involved or learn more.

Professor Elinor O'Connor (29:33)

So I think maybe Tash, in relation to the project that Kevin and I are working on at the moment with organisational interventions, we are going to write up a selection of case studies. So real life examples of veterinary workplaces that have implemented interventions. And the intention is that will be a resource that is freely available for the veterinary sector.

Available obviously in due course from the RCVS website. So that will give people concrete examples of what people have done in veterinary workplaces to address work demands, to increase resources at work and essentially promote wellbeing.

We want to try and encapsulate the lessons learned from those people who've implemented these interventions So that would include things like what they found worked for them, what went well. But importantly some of the challenges they face, things they might have done differently with hindsight. So it's sort of sharing those practical tips. We've already conducted interviews with a number of workplaces, which is great.

We're still open to examples of interventions that people are interested in. So if anybody listening would like to share some examples of what they've done in their workplaces, Kevin and I'd be delighted to hear from them and I'm sure we can share contact details with the notes for this podcast.

Professor Jason Spendelow (30:47)

From my perspective, we've done quite a lot of work on the scientific validation of the OHIQ, and it's performing really well. We've got some more advanced kind of analysis planned through a subsequent study. And for practices, the OHIQ is there and freely available to use at any time. And it's got a very low burden on staff and organisation, as I said, it's a five-minute administration time.

We provide a nice kind of report with a profile of your organisation and we've had a lot of organisations take advantage of that already. So it's just a call out to organisations who are kind interested in that particular talk to get in touch with me because we can make it available to them.

Tash Goodwin Roberts (31:24)

Fantastic. Thank you. I think that feels like a a good place for us to wrap up and end. And just a really helpful reminder that this is about more than just raising awareness. It's about understanding what helps people and what helps workplaces to take practical and meaningful action. So, thank you all for your time today. It’s been such a useful and thoughtful conversation and I've really appreciated hearing each of your perspectives and have definitely taken a lot away from it. So I'm sure our listeners will have too. So to our listeners, if you'd like to find out more about what's being discussed today, we will include details in the show notes and links to resources that we've mentioned and and a few extra as well. So all that remains is for me to say thank you again to our lovely guests, Elinor, Kevin and Jason. Thank you so much for joining us.

Professor Jason Spendelow (32:04)

Pleasure.

Thanks everyone.

Interview with Dr John Tulloch and Dr Tamzin Furtado

Angharad Belcher (32:19)

Now we are going to move on to further discussion with two of our other Mind Matters grant holders. and I think today's conversation is going to be really interesting. So before we get started, let's do some introductions. I'm Angharad and I'm Director for Advancement of the Professions and also Director of Mind Matters here at the RCVS. And today I am joined by John and Tamzin. So, John, would you be kind enough to introduce yourself, please?

John Tulloch (32:41)

Yeah, hi Angharad. I'm John Tulloch. I'm a lecturer in veterinary public health at the University of Liverpool. and my research is all around looking at veterinary occupational health.

Angharad Belcher (32:51)

We're going to come to a question in a moment as to what is veterinary occupational health and and how does it differ. But before we get to that, Tamsin, would you be kind enough to tell us a little bit more about yourself, please?

Tamzin Furtado (33:01)

Yes, hi, thanks so much for having us. I'm Tamzin Furtado I'm a lecturer here at the University of Liverpool and I study everything related to humans in the veterinary field, really. So human psychology, human decision making and so on. And that could be owners or vets or other stakeholders. but primarily vets and pet nurses, of course, in this case.

Angharad Belcher (33:17)

Excellent.

Before we get into the research and what you're going to be doing, are you able just to tell us a little bit more about why you decided to apply for the Mind Matters grant, please?

John Tulloch (33:25)

Yeah, I think there are a couple of reasons. I think firstly seeing the success and the output of previous Mind Matters projects and seeing how they'd been supported and, you know, changes happening off the back of them is really important. So it appears to be a grant scheme that, you know, doesn't just fund projects but there's support afterwards for changing the profession. And I think the second reason is to work closely with the Royal College.

We believe the topic that we're researching can have huge impact on people within the profession. So to be funded by the Royal College of our profession means that hopefully we're aligned on what's important and that we can facilitate good change off the back of the project in the future.

Angharad Belcher (34:05)

Absolutely. Being collaborative is such a a great way of making sure that we can engender that change and have it to be longer lasting. So for those of you who are interested in applying, then do look out for the social media and on our website for for more information for when we'll be launching the grants for 2027. So let's move on to thinking about why.

Let's start with some basics then. So John, you mentioned veterinary occupational health. What does that mean?

John Tulloch (34:28)

So it's all around looking after your own health when you're at work. That's the definition of occupational health. And so looking at it in the veterinary context and lots of other disciplines have had loads of research looking into how to maintain a healthy workforce. But there isn't a huge amount in the veterinary sector, and we have some very specific challenges, which are primarily our patients. That they pose a hazard to our health that virtually any other profession doesn't have to deal with.

Angharad Belcher (34:57)

Which is a really interesting challenge, isn't it? So bringing it into then the more severe occupational injury and trauma informed organisations, can you tell us a little bit about the research that you've done so far and also other research that perhaps has been undertaken as well?

John Tulloch (35:12)

Yeah, so we've done some research where we've tried to basically get a baseline understanding of how many injuries occur whilst people are at work and what those main causes are. And over ninety percent of vets and vet nurses of whatever discipline they're in get injured at some point during their career.

About 50 to 65% of individuals are going to get injured each year. So injury rates are really quite high. And the nature of them as well, they're primarily animal related. And two percent of those across the board end up being admitted into a hospital. So a severe occupational injury is an injury where someone is admitted into a hospital and then spend more than one night in hospital.

Angharad Belcher (35:56)

Which is quite a significant impact on somebody's day-to-day life, let alone thinking about the longer-term side of things. So just thinking about those numbers do you have any idea as to how this compares to perhaps human health care and injuries that human professionals might be facing?

John Tulloch (36:11)

In the UK, it's quite hard to get a handle on that data because we are a small profession. So the the main place that we can look is in the US for data. And the veterinary industry is consistently in the top five professions for non-fatal injuries. Last year we were second only to ski instructors. So we very much exceed healthcare professionals and we even exceed farmers and those working in agriculture and the main hazard that we're facing that other other professions don't particularly have is that constant contact with animals and they're related to more than eighty percent of all the injuries that are occurring to vets and vet nurses.

Angharad Belcher (36:48)

And those numbers in terms of thinking about the other professions, those are probably quite alarming to some people who perhaps haven't thought about this before. So I think this gives us a great background as to why why this and why now. Are you able to tell us a little bit more about what you intend to do with the project and what its purpose is?

Tamzin Furtado (37:04)

Sure, absolutely. So in this project, we wanted to find out what are people's experiences around experiencing those severe injuries and then going through the process of recovery and returning to work over the longer term. And what are people experiencing in terms of themselves, managing their physical health, their mental health, perhaps any lasting trauma that they might have had, and how is that impacting them in their work if they do return to work. So maybe they might have, for example, a change in the types of animals that they treat or how they feel while they're at work, how they interact with colleagues. But also perhaps that might change their perception of themselves or their career plans in the longer term. So we expect that there will be a huge range of experiences that people may want to share with us. But the ultimate goal is that we will bring together those experiences in order to work out how we can give workplaces in the veterinary community better tools in order to support people who experience those severe injuries in the course of their work. So that might be around how people get reintegrated into the workplace, but also in terms of how people are supported whilst they're experiencing that recovery or thinking about their career in the longer term. So what we'll be doing is inviting vets and vet nurses to share with us their experiences in an informal interview so that will be for example on Teams so basically that feels like an informal talk where you can share your experiences completely at your own liberty you can say what you want it's then completely anonymised so for example if someone were to share their experiences and talk about a specific practice that they've been in or a specific situation then they would be given, for example, a pseudonym, names would be altered and so on, so that people can feel really free to be completely honest about their own experiences.

And then what we do is we have a systematic process where we put together those experiences and analyse them as this is qualitative data. We have a systematic process called thematic reflective thematic analysis where we look at those experiences and we look at for example the under underlying attitudes that there might be, the cultures, the practices, the beliefs and the experiences that people have, so that we can then create something really practical and tangible to help people in the longer term and future if these things arise.

Angharad Belcher (39:07)

That sounds like a really great approach and a good opportunity there for people to to think about getting involved. I understand that you're currently going through the ethics process at the moment. so that will mean then from a recruitment perspective, you'll be ready to go out and start recruiting people to be part of this. How many people are you are you looking to hear from?

Tamzin Furtado (39:24)

We're hoping to hear from at least 15 people, but it will depend a little bit on on how many people want to come forward because we'd really like to have a good body of evidence from for example, small animal practice, equine, and so on. So it does depend who wants to talk to us. As qualitative research. That might sound like quite small numbers to people who are more familiar with quantitative research and surveys. This is a little bit different. The point is that we want really in depth, we want to hear the things that you can't really capture in tick boxes in a survey, for example, which is why you're given the time to talk one-on-one to someone and say what is important to you. So that's why there is less people than you might expect in a survey, for example, but those people are given much more airtime because those experiences are just so individual and very hard to kind of fit into the confines of when you're designing a survey, where you know, I'm sure we've all failed in surveys and thought, I wish I could just explain myself more which is why we've got those sorts of numbers.

Angharad Belcher (40:12)

Reflecting on some of the other research that we've undertaken and the experiences that people have shared with us, we know that returning to work can sometimes go really well and people can be really supported and sometimes there's a little bit to be desired, shall we say. What are you looking for in terms of your recruitment for this? Are you looking for purely people with less good experiences or do you want to mix?

Tamzin Furtado (40:32)

Thank you. That's such a good question. We would like people with a whole range of experiences. So if you're thinking about whether to take part just listening to this, we'd love to hear from you whether you had a great experience and you know everyone around you really looked after you and you felt so supported and everything was fine. Through to I very much hope you didn't have a horrible experience, but if you did, then hopefully we can use that for good by learning from those experiences.

The point of this is to create something really practical. So no matter what you experienced, if you're interested in taking part and would like to chat to us, we would love to hear from you.

Angharad Belcher (40:59)

That'll be great. Well, hopefully some of our listeners will be inspired to sign up and participate. Thinking about what comes next once you've got all of this, you've done all the analysis, what impact do you think could be had by this research? How might it influence change within veterinary culture within the UK or anywhere else?

John Tulloch (41:16)

Well, I think one of the things that we've seen from our research already is that injury is really normalised within the culture of the profession. and often it's seen with almost earning your battle stripes kind of culture, which makes it challenging to support people appropriately because it's brushed off. You know, lots of our research has shown that people don't take time off work. They don't look after themselves after they've been injured. And we know that if you continue working whilst you're injured, you're much more likely for you to get injured again or a colleague around you to get injured. So we really want to understand what mental health impact there is for people with these severe injuries, how they're integrated into the workplace. And whether we can then build guidance to help practice culture, set that workplace integration right and to get the support right for people. So that if someone is injured, there's no stigma, there's no shame attached to it, and that that transition for those individuals back to work is as positive as it can be for them.

Angharad Belcher (42:19)

It's a really interesting point that you raised there around the sort of responsibility to the wider team members when you have got an injury and coming back and the role of managers and leaders that sit within this. So I'm really looking forward to seeing what comes of this and how we can then move this conversation forward. We will keep our listeners updated with the recruitment and also where the research gets to. And hopefully we will speak to you again once you've got further with this. So thank you both very much.

Tamzin Furtado (42:42)

Thank you so much.

Outro

Abi Judd-English (42:57)

Many thanks to all of our fantastic guests today. We really appreciate you taking the time to tell us all about your wonderful work. If you'd like to find out more about any of the projects discussed today, relevant links have been added to the show notes. This includes a link to our Mind Matters Understanding and Managing Stress in the Veterinary Workplace Guide, developed by our guest, Professor Elinor O'Connor, on behalf of the College. Don't forget, listening to this episode can also count towards your annual CPD requirement, so be sure to record and reflect via one CPD.

Many thanks again for listening and we'll see you next time.