Improve practice culture with female leadership, says senior vet

Workplace culture in veterinary practice can be improved by making leadership more reflective of the gender split within the profession, a leading clinician has suggested.

BVA president Rob Williams discussed the issue while speaking alongside outgoing BVNA president Lyndsay Hughes in their talk, “Growing a positive workplace culture”, at BVNA Congress in Telford.

Dr Williams noted the majority of vets (67%) and vet nurses (97%) are female, but delegates agreed with him that practices are male gendered in how they’re set up, structured and run.

He said: “It’s completely ridiculous. It makes no sense. I strongly believe that [negative workplace culture] would be improved if it stopped being gendered male and flipped to being gendered female.

“A lot of this could be improved if we reimagined what the workplace looks like”.

Do something different

Asked how to achieve this, he said men and others like himself in “incredibly privileged” positions “talking about it and raising it as an issue, and acknowledging it’s real and it exists, and we need to do something different”.

Mrs Hughes said it “cuts [her] deep” when nurses don’t get input into clinical protocols and patient care, and she urged delegates to speak up.

She said: “As nurses, that’s the biggest thing that we can do. We do have a voice.

“We can’t get frustrated if we don’t feel we’re being listened to, if we’re not actually speaking up in the first place”.

She added: “Vets sometimes aren’t clear about what we can do, and so that’s our responsibility to take accountability as part of that team to make sure that actually we’re communicating”.

Self-awareness

The RVN also discussed the need for “self-awareness” among practice leaders regarding how their behaviour impacts others.

Dr Williams admitted he used to treat colleagues poorly until a “transformative” experience caused him to change.

He said: “Think of the worst vet – from a behaviour point of view – that you’ve ever worked with, and then times them by 10, and you still won’t come close to how much of an arsehole I used to be.

“If I wanted something, rather than asking for it, I would often kick the door in theatre until I got what I wanted.

“I was a drama queen and prima donna of epic proportions; it was like working with a four-year-old constantly. I’m not proud of it”.

Epiphany

He said witnessing one of his supervisors throwing a scalpel at a nurse’s head caused him to have an “epiphany”, and he has since apologised to many of his former colleagues.

Dr Williams acknowledged the busy nature of the job can make finding the time to change practice culture feel difficult, but “you don’t have the time not to”.

He continued: “The most valuable thing you can do to ensure that you are delivering the great clinical care that you will all want to deliver is that you remember you’re a person first and a vet or vet nurse second”.

He added: “We are people first and we forget that to our detriment, and I think that’s probably the biggest thing that needs to change.”