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For many in the veterinary industry their job description extends well beyond providing health care for animals. Human clients often need their help too but with many over-taxed vet teams struggling to be all things to both patients and clients, a solution may be just around the corner. By Kathy Graham
Counsellor, financial adviser, grief companion, patient translator. How many job descriptions for positions in the veterinary sector list these as prerequisites? Yet many vets and their staff routinely perform these—and many other human management roles as well—while still treating and caring for animals.
But it’s a big ask, says Dr Robyn Whitaker, and one that’s taking a toll.
“Essentially every vet and vet nurse are expected to be—and try to be—social workers every day. Yet we are social workers with no training in social work, no support, and no resources. It is one of the biggest contributors to poor mental health in the profession.”
Dr Whitaker, a veteran of 30 years of small animal clinical practice, and self-described “veterinary social worker advocate”, wants to see social workers trained in the vet space to help relieve vets and their teams of some of these responsibilities. “The bottom line is, we don’t have the capacity and why should we try and train vets and nurses to be social workers when there are actually social workers out there who are trained to do social work and are good at their job? When you think about it, it’s an absolute no-brainer and everybody that we have this conversation with comes back and says, ‘Oh my goodness, that just makes so much sense’.”
In 2022, Dr Whitaker and five others co-founded social enterprise Veterinary and Community Care (VaCC) to “make inroads into veterinary profession issues and crises such as workforce shortages and mental health”. But integrating social workers into veterinary and other animal care sector settings is currently its primary focus after the charity successfully applied for a $280,000 grant to run an 18-month pilot. This involves training five social workers, placing them in clinics and assessing their effectiveness.
Yet veterinary social work is not a new discipline. In fact, it started over 20 years ago in the US at the University of Tennessee and has since spread to other parts of the world. There are even some vet clinics in Australia who employ and train their own social workers. But unlike in the US where social workers can undertake formal training and emerge with a formal qualification, this isn’t the case in Australia.
Wendy Till is the only formally trained veterinary social worker in Australia having trained herself at the University of Tennessee in the US. (Note in WA, ‘veterinary social workers’ are referred to as ‘one welfare social workers’ because ‘veterinary’ is a protected term in the state. But as Dr Whitaker points out, “One welfare social work actually encompasses better what we’re doing because our work isn’t just confined to the veterinary setting although that’s currently our prime focus.”) Till is also founder of Meraki Social Work Services and is working as a consultant with VaCC to, among other things, write the theoretical modules for the pilot program.
“I spent 12 months writing a very bespoke set of theory training modules for experienced, qualified social workers,” says Till. “A micro credential they can add to their suite of abilities and scope of practice as a social worker.”
The modules are designed to educate social workers to do the myriad things that social workers typically do but in the vet space—one where clients bring their ‘fur baby’ to receive the very best treatment and care (but then often baulk at the price).
As the human-animal bond has strengthened in the last decades, so too has pressure mounted on veterinary teams to meet client demands while justifying high (unsubsidised) costs. Both Till and Dr Whitaker agree finances are often behind the stress and dilemmas that arise in the vet-client relationship.
It’s actually not a difficult business case to propose. If you’ve got a social worker that’s working in some way with your team, what you bring as an employer is obviously going to be massively positive to anybody that’s coming. So just that alone is enough to sell it in my book.
Dr Robyn Whitaker, Veterinary and Community Care
The many ways a trained up social worker can help a team buckling under the strain are connecting clients to services, such as financial, homelessness, or mental health; offering them counselling and support if, say, decisions about euthanasia need to be made; and translating vet jargon into plain speak. Social workers can be indispensable to the vet team too, helping staff debrief after, for example, a difficult interaction with a pet owner or an unexpected patient outcome; creating psychological safety in teams that maybe aren’t working well together; and assisting with boundary setting.
“Social workers are just perfect for this space because social workers really are the bridge,” Till enthuses. “They’re the bridge between services, and they’re huge collaborators.”
“I call the social workers the full package,” adds Dr Whitaker, “because they can work on so many different levels and they can become embedded to a greater or lesser degree with the veterinary team and understand what goes on in that team dynamic, and they can actually be early intervention for the team themselves, plus also the clients.”
The 18-month pilot stil has six months to run. In the next phase, the five social workers, having almost completed their training modules, will join one of 16 partner practices as observers.
“We have spent the last three years building relationships with practices around Perth and WA to be part of this journey,” says Dr Whitaker. “They’ve agreed to host participants who during this three-month period will literally be flies on the wall. They’re just going to go in and absorb the vet world.”
In the last component of the project, the by now fully fledged one welfare social workers will be employed part-time (their wage covered by the grant) for six months in the practices that have joined VaCC’s community of practices, the idea being that after receiving both these social workers’ and Till’s services—Till having provided free social work services to practices during the observation period—clinics will know firsthand their value.
“What we’re hoping and anticipating is that during those six months when all these practices are getting exposed and utilising these services, they’re all going to go, “This is amazing. We need this to continue’,” says Dr Whitaker, adding that feedback so far has been very positive.
But she stresses this is a pilot project only—”It is not an accredited, endorsed, or official qualification”— and that what both she and Till are hoping is that tertiary institutions will take the baton. “What we’d love is for a tertiary institution or a registered training organisation to take this up and run with it and actually provide social workers (or other allied health professionals with that depth of knowledge of working with people and within systems) with a post grad qualification in one welfare or veterinary social work. Yeah, that would be perfect,” says Till.
The hope is that vet social workers is an idea whose time has come and that in five years, they’ll be firmly on the radar. “I’m certainly not for a minute saying that every practice is going to have a full-time social worker employed,” says Dr Whitaker, adding that while this might be more feasible for larger practices, a group of smaller practices might contract the services of one to share among them. “Wouldn’t that be lovely? But I would hope that they are not uncommon and that people will think, ‘Oh yeah, well, of course we have the option of doing that’.”
Both Dr Whitaker and Till believe having a social worker on staff will be a point of difference for practices. “That’s what the American experience has found,” says Till.
“It’s actually not a difficult business case to propose,” agrees Dr Whitaker. “If you’ve got a social worker that’s working in some way with your team, what you bring as an employer is obviously going to be massively positive to anybody that’s coming. So just that alone is enough to sell it in my book.”
