
160: Toxic Workplaces Just Got Expensive: What The New Psychological Safety Laws Mean For Vet Practices. With Rhonda Andrews
From The Vet Vault: Fall In Love With Veterinary Science by Dr. Hubert Hiemstra
May 30, 2026 · 56 min
About this episode
This episode discusses the implications of new psychological safety laws for veterinary practices, featuring insights from psychologist Rhonda Andrews.
A surgeon hurls a scalpel across theatre. It clatters off the wall. Nobody looks up. Twenty minutes later he's in the tearoom offering everyone a biscuit, and someone shrugs: "That's just him when he's stressed." If you've worked in veterinary practice for any length of time, you've got your own version of that story - maybe a bit less dramatic, but still things that completely destroy psychological safety. This episode is about that stuff, and the new psychosocial safety laws now rolling out across Australia that say plainly: no, actually, that's not acceptable. To make sense of what that looks like on a normal Tuesday in a normal practice, you'll hear from psychologist Rhonda Andrews, who works across high-pressure industries - emergency departments, the courts, and the veterinary profession - and who has spent years watching them all wrestle with the same problem: people breaking. This conversation is not about “just be more resilient”, but about systems. Rhonda makes a genuinely good-news case that these laws aren't more bureaucracy to dread - they're the push our profession has needed all along. You'll hear Why the things you've always filed under "just part…
People in this episode
Host: Dr. Hubert Hiemstra
Guest: Rhonda Andrews
Topics covered
- psychological safety
- veterinary practice
- workplace culture
- laws
- mental health
- resilience
Keywords
- psychological safety
- veterinary
- workplace injury
- laws
- performance conversation
- mental health
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Australia
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