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With her early legal training followed by a wealth of experience in the veterinary industry, few are better qualified than Cat Walker to help vet professionals resolve conflicts or even better, stop them from developing in the first place. By Kathy Graham
‘Peace is not the absence of conflict, but the ability to cope with it.’ These words of Mahatma Gandhi will resonate with Cat Walker, who has recently launched a subscription-based complaints resolution service for vet clinics to help defuse tensions that can arise between veterinary staff and clients. The service, she explains, “provides clinics an opportunity to not only protect their team from the mental health stressors that come with difficult client interactions and complaints, the number one source of poor mental health in veterinary teams, but also to help clients raise feedback with clinics and have it followed through by a mutual third party.”
Walker, whose experience as a mediator already extends to helping resolve not just client complaints, but also those involving team members, shareholders and business partners, insists there’s a need for an alternative model that allows issues to be addressed “by a neutral third party” before they become intractable problems.
To this end, clinics that subscribe to Walker’s service will be encouraged to not only refer their client complaints to her service for the purpose of finding a resolution beneficial to both parties, but also to solicit feedback from clients via a URL or QR code that Walker will provide which will then link back to her service. “The idea is that complaints occur along a continuum, so getting feedback is a really good way to catch future complaints because if you have one client that says, ‘Actually, I didn’t think that the process was explained to me and I was left feeling a bit confused,’ then you can have a look at that process and make any necessary changes.”
Walker believes “a poorly managed complaint is a mediation waiting to happen” and this is what motivated her to “go further upstream and ask, ‘Where can we intervene and help improve the mental health of veterinary teams?’ because this is the only way I can be in this industry.”
Walker herself is no stranger to the industry, having previously co-owned a veterinary practice in tropical North Queensland with her veterinarian husband. This was after a period of both studying and performing as a musician. She juggled the latter while earning a Bachelor of Arts, majoring in International Studies, before working for a “company called RepuTex on the social impact team, where we looked at ASX 100 companies and ABN AMRO financial bundles and assessed their social impact”.
She followed that up with a law degree, having moved from Melbourne to Brisbane for health reasons. There she met her soon-to-be husband.
The idea is that complaints occur along a continuum, so getting feedback is a really good way to catch future complaints because if you have one client that says, ‘Actually, I didn’t think that the process was explained to me and I was left feeling a bit confused,’ then you can have a look at that process and make any necessary changes.
Cat Walker
Within a year of moving to the Atherton Tablelands in 2012, the two opened a vet practice, Walker got her Certificate IV in Veterinary Nursing, and it wasn’t long before “the business was really successful”. During the nine years they ran it—Walker was first the practice then general manager—the couple had two kids. After their first child was born in 2017, Walker started a podcast for vet nurses and technicians because she “wanted to keep a hand in with nursing, as I knew I’d be working from home more with my son”.
As it turned out, her podcast “became an accidental life raft for me because when everything went down and I needed to move, as soon as I got down here and I needed to look for a job and start a new career, I already had this platform, which was great”.
The cost of success
The couple’s success running their own practice came at a huge cost. Walker’s husband was frequently the sole vet due to the impossibility of finding other veterinarians and even locums to help him shoulder the workload. The subsequent stress took a toll on his health and their marriage.
“I kept asking what was wrong,” Walker remembers. “I assumed it was severe burnout. I kept on saying, ‘Please, can we sell the clinic?’”
In October 2020, the situation came to head and within four months Walker, having by now moved to the Sunshine Coast with her young children, had sold the clinic, parted from her husband, and was weighing up her options professionally. She knew she didn’t want to go back to law. She also knew she was now personally invested in mental health in the veterinary profession, having first witnessed the decline of her marriage and then managed the PTSD that the experience left her with. It wasn’t long before she saw a way of fusing her two main interest areas.
She explains, “Mediation is something that I decided to get into because of my previous life as a litigation lawyer. And I thought, ‘Well, what can I do to bring my clinical, legal, business owner and manager skills together in the veterinary industry?’ And I thought, ‘Okay, mediation is great, let’s do that.’ And then secondly, having the interest area of mental health because of what happened. It just so happens that these two areas of conflict and mental health that mean something to me seem to be very big issues in veterinary medicine.”
Mediation is something that I decided to get into because of my previous life as a litigation lawyer. And I thought, ‘Well, what can I do to bring my clinical, legal, business owner and manager skills together in the veterinary industry?’ And I thought, ‘Okay, mediation is great, let’s do that.’
Cat Walker
Walker next re-qualified as a mediator and enrolled in her Graduate Certificate in Mental Health and Neuroscience to develop evidence-based strategies grounded in conflict theory and science. She says this is because, “from a neurological perspective, we perceive difficult client interactions and complaints as a potential threat which causes a physiological stress response”.
Lines of tension
In this triggered state, calm and rational discussion is challenging, hence Walker explains the focus needs to be on moving parties back towards homeostasis, from where they can start employing, more constructive, cognitive reframing. This is why taking time out is so important for “everybody to sit back and calm down. And then the conflict is going to be easier to resolve”.
Walker’s primary aim in all her work—not just as a mediator but as a podcaster (still), associate university lecturer, consultant, and public speaker—is sounding the alarm on mental health and highlighting what she calls “lines of tension” in the industry.
Huge advances in veterinary medicine coupled with the status we give our pets is just one example of a line of tension that can develop between clients and the vet. This occurs when the client and the vet have different ideas about what is best for a pet at the end of life, for example, or because the owner expects the very best treatment for their animal yet resents having to pay for it.
Walker believes the fundamental problem is that the veterinary business model is one we have outgrown yet “we soldier on as though the model still works in this really complex environment. That’s where the model is broken. Humans in the veterinary industry who love animals, and love what they do, are using themselves to patch the hole in the bucket so the water doesn’t leak out. So, for example, if they just discount their services, they don’t have to see that the water’s leaking from the ‘hole’ that is medical maximalism without Medicare.”
Walker, who says “there are many such leaks that we really need to be leaving in order to assess the problems and move towards innovation” relishes her various roles because they are opportunities to ask, “‘What is the problem?… Great, let’s get right into that. Let’s talk to other people who are interested in this problem because then we are talking about solutions.’ And that to me is really exciting.”
