042 - How to embrace and retain part time vet mums at your veterinary clinic with Dr Jocelyn Birch Baker of Smooth Operating Vets - part 1/2

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Julie South interviews Jocelyn Birch Baker of Smooth Operating Vets + High Street Veterinary Clinic in Rockhampton, Queensland, Australia

Jocelyn’s vision at Smooth Operating Vets is to ensure all veterinary women have the opportunity to work in a team where everyone knows their talents and calmly does their very best in an encouraging and supporting place…. That women can return to veterinary practice after the birth of their babies with the skills, knowledge and confidence they need, to work in clinics that are supportive and flexible … where everyone works together - like a community - to achieve everyone’s goals. 

Over the course of her career, Jocelyn’s experienced many areas of the veterinary profession – from the cattle industry through to mixed and small animal clinics.  

She’s held positions on Australian national and state boards and committees and has taken time out of her career to raise her children.

Today, as the owner of High Street Veterinary Surgery in Rockhampton, Queensland, she’s had hands-on, day-to-day experience of what it’s like to be a practice owner in today’s veterinary marketplace.   

Jocelyn understands the complexities of running a profitable practice, while having an excellent lifestyle for herself and enabling everyone on her team to have excellent lifestyles too.

As the founder of Smooth Operating Vets, Jocelyn is working to create mother-friendly veterinary practices.   She believes that creating mother-friendly vet clinics is essential to help reduce the number of highly skilled veterinarians who leave the profession because they can’t find positions that support, nurture and respect them as veterinarians and mothers.

In this episode she talks about buying her practice – and then not long after she bought it two vets and a few nurses resigned …  Jocelyn’s first foray into recruitment to replace her departing staff was to do what everyone else does because that’s what she thought she had to do … but then she realised she didn’t need to do it that way at all – because “that” way doesn’t work.

The way Jocelyn now recruits, together with the systems and procedures she’s put in place, is non-traditional but it works.   This is what Smooth Operating Vets is all about.

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