Taking Charge of Your Veterinary Career with Dr. Melanie Bowden

Welcome back to The Veterinary Project Podcast! In this episode, Jonathan and Mike are sitting down with TedX Speaker and Practicing Veterinarian Dr. Melanie Bowden!

"A veterinary practice should be like a family. Create a work place that is meaningful with a positive culture - it's an opportunity to create a community"

Dr. Melanie Bowden is passionate about starting a revolution in the veterinary industry. By developing better partnerships between veterinarians and pet owners, she hopes to build a better future for the veterinary profession and the animals we all love.

Dr. Bowden is a graduate of WSU College of Veterinary Medicine and a practicing veterinarian with active licenses in Idaho, Washington, Oregon, Maine and New Hampshire.

Having worked in corporate, family-owned and emergency clinic settings, Dr. Bowden has witnessed first-hand the burn-out, compassion fatigue, and emotional exhaustion that is plaguing the veterinary industry. In 2020, Dr. Bowden will launch her business, Vacation Vet LLC, to provide relief veterinary services to veterinary clinics throughout the PNW and New England.

Dr. Bowden will be filling in when veterinarians need time off for vacations, conferences, sick leave or just because a clinic is under-staffed. She hopes through her relief work she can help lighten the load on other veterinarians, help them achieve better work/life balance, and raise awareness about burnout and suicide in the veterinary field.

In her conversation with Jonny and Mike, Melanie dives into a number of personal experiences and education topics including:

• Not recognizing the signs of burnout and how she worked her way out of it
• Identifying when a role isn't working for you and pivoting into something else
• How to be vulnerable when speaking to an audience
• How to make veterinary medicine work for your lifestyle
• Ways of managing the guilt caused by not being able to help everyone
• Why relief work may be right for you
• What it means to "train the client" - being proactive and have effective client discussions
• Why you don’t get what you deserve in life, you get what you negotiate
• Looking at clinic culture - the differences between corporate vs private
• The future of veterinary leadership
• The Impact Round!
• Final words of wisdom

Her TedX talk has been viewed over 300,000 times and you can it out here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=objP3E625Xo&feature=youtu.be

Want to get in touch with Melanie directly? You can do so through:

IG @vacationvet

www.melaniebowden.com

**Please note we did our best to limit some of the audio difficulties we were having with this episode. While technology is great, every so often there's a day when the internet lags behind. We hope you didn't mind it too much!**

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We'd love it if you joined us for The Veterinary Project journey and connected with our community of like-minded Veterinary professionals. Send us an email at theveterinaryprojectpodcast@gmail.com and we'll get you connected to our private Facebook group.

Any questions, comments, feedback, or requests for guests can also be sent to theveterinaryprojectpodcast@gmail.com.

Thank you for listening and we look forward to seeing you next Wednesday for another episode of The Veterinary Project Podcast

- Michael Bugg, DVM & Jonathan Leicht, DVM