I Became a Vet to Practice Medicine. Here’s What Nobody Told Me About the Admin.

When I decided to become a veterinarian, I knew the job would be hard.

I expected difficult cases, emotional conversations, and long hours. I knew there would be nights spent worrying about patients and days where nothing seemed to go according to plan. 

What I did not expect was how much of my career would revolve around work that had very little to do with actually examining a patient.

Like most veterinarians, I went to school to practice medicine. I wanted to solve problems, build relationships with clients, and help animals. What nobody really explained was that modern veterinary medicine is built on an enormous amount of behind-the-scenes coordination.

The medicine is still the reason we are here, but medicine alone is not always what fills most of our days.

The work around the medicine

Over the years, I have come to realize that one of the biggest challenges in veterinary medicine is not necessarily the difficult cases. It is the number of things competing for our attention at any given moment.

A typical day rarely unfolds one patient at a time. Instead, it feels like carrying dozens of partially completed tasks in your head while trying to stay focused on the patient standing in front of you. You may be discussing a new diagnosis with one client while mentally reminding yourself to call another family about bloodwork results. 

Between appointments, prescription approvals are waiting in your inbox, questions from technicians, pharmacy requests, schedule changes, and messages that need responses.

None of these responsibilities is particularly difficult on its own. The challenge is that they never arrive one at a time.

Years ago, I assumed that the exhaustion many veterinarians felt came primarily from difficult cases. There is certainly truth to that. Compassion fatigue is real. Grief is real. The emotional weight of caring for patients and supporting families through difficult decisions is something every veterinarian understands.

But after years in practice, I have come to appreciate another contributor that receives far less attention: The sheer cognitive load of carrying hundreds of unfinished tasks at the same time.

Every recommendation we make creates additional work. Recommend bloodwork, and someone needs to communicate the results. Prescribe medication, and eventually someone has to process a refill request. Recommend a recheck, and someone has to track whether it happened. Hospitalize a patient, and now there are treatment sheets, updates, invoices, shift changes, and discharge instructions.

None of this is bad. In fact, it is what good medicine looks like.

The challenge is that every patient generates dozens of small responsibilities that continue long after the appointment ends.

Ownership changed everything

I do not think this fully clicked for me until I became a practice owner.

In fact, I think it became even more obvious when I purchased my second hospital.

Managing one hospital was challenging enough. Managing two hospitals operating on different systems was something else entirely. Suddenly, I was spending enormous amounts of time trying to answer what should have been simple questions. 

How was one hospital performing compared to the other? Were we staffing appropriately? Were our doctors practicing similarly? Were we seeing the same trends?

What I discovered was that much of my day was no longer spent practicing medicine.

It was spent gathering information so I could make decisions.

At first, I found that frustrating. I became a veterinarian because I loved the medicine. But over time, I realized that ownership required a completely different skill set than I had anticipated. The medicine still mattered, but now I was also responsible for creating the environment where that medicine happened.

Nobody teaches you that part in veterinary school.

Nobody teaches you about payroll. Or, at least they didn’t in 2010.

Nobody teaches you about evaluating software vendors, comparing inventory costs, negotiating contracts, or building compensation plans.

Nobody teaches you how to navigate employee conflicts, difficult client situations, or the reality that some days you will spend more time solving people problems than medical ones.

I always knew I wanted to own a practice. From early in my career, that was the goal.

I remember receiving advice that you should never buy a practice you have not worked in for at least five years. At the time, I thought that sounded excessive. Five years felt like forever.

Ironically, I ended up following that advice.

Now, looking back, I am not entirely sure five years was enough.

There are simply parts of ownership that are difficult to understand until you are the person responsible for making the decisions. No amount of ambition can substitute for experience.

The invisible work

One of the hardest lessons for me personally was realizing that much of an owner’s work is invisible.

Early in my ownership journey, I occasionally had associates question whether I was working as hard as they were. At the time, that was difficult to hear because I knew how many hours were happening outside of appointments and outside of the hospital walls.

What they could see was the doctor’s schedule.

What they could not see were the evenings spent reviewing financial reports, researching equipment purchases, preparing for payroll, implementing new systems, or trying to solve problems that would hopefully never reach the exam room.

I still remember running payroll for the first time after purchasing a practice.

It sounds silly now, but I distinctly remember thinking, “Do I actually have enough money in the bank account to pay everyone?”

Of course I did. But until that moment, it had never occurred to me that dozens of people were depending on me to get that right.

Suddenly, I was not only responsible for my patients. I was responsible for the livelihood of an entire team. Their schedules. Their training. Their benefits. Their ability to do good work every day.

That perspective changes you. Ownership is harder than being an associate. It is not a competition. The work is simply different.

As an associate, I was primarily responsible for my patients.

As an owner, I became responsible for the systems supporting everyone else’s patients, too.

The clinic is really a communication system

As I spent more time leading teams, I began to realize that many of the frustrations we blamed on being busy were actually communication problems.

The schedule might feel overwhelming, but often the real issue was that information was not flowing efficiently from one person to the next. A doctor had a plan in mind, but never documented it clearly. A callback was discussed but not assigned. A recommendation was made in the exam room, but was never communicated consistently at checkout.

Small gaps like these create extra work for everyone.

They generate additional phone calls, questions, interruptions, and, eventually, stress.

The longer I spend in practice, the more convinced I become that a veterinary hospital is, at its core, a communication system.

Medicine sits at its center, but every team member is constantly passing information to someone else. Doctors communicate plans to technicians. Technicians communicate updates to clients. Receptionists coordinate schedules and expectations. Managers communicate standards, priorities, and goals.

The medical record itself becomes a communication tool between everyone involved in the patient’s care.

When communication is clear, the hospital feels calm. When it breaks down, everything becomes harder.

Why workflow matters

That realization has influenced how I think about leadership, operations, and technology.

For much of my career, I assumed that frustration with workflows, software, and processes was simply part of veterinary medicine. Systems were clunky. Information was hard to find. Records lived in multiple places. We worked around the limitations, as we understood them to be normal.

Then I started seeing what was actually possible.

I realized that efficiency is not about working faster. It is about reducing friction.

• Can the team find the information they need?
• Can they confidently answer the client’s question?
• Can they understand the plan for this patient without tracking down three different people?
• Can they spend more time caring for patients and less time searching for answers?

Those questions matter because attention is finite.

Most veterinary professionals are not struggling because they lack dedication. They are struggling because they are trying to manage an overwhelming number of responsibilities simultaneously.

Every unnecessary click, every unclear handoff, every missing piece of information asks them to carry one more thing.

Eventually, those things add up.

What I wish someone had told me

I still love the medicine. That part never changed.

I still love solving cases, helping patients, and building relationships with clients. If anything, I appreciate those moments even more now than I did when I graduated.

But if I could go back and tell veterinary-school Lauren one thing, it would be this: The medicine is only part of the job.

A huge part of being a veterinarian is learning how to manage information, coordinate people, communicate clearly, and build systems that allow good medicine to happen consistently.

Nobody taught me that in veterinary school - it took years in practice to learn.

And maybe that is why so many veterinarians are surprised by how exhausting this profession can feel at times. We prepare extensively for the medicine. The rest, we mostly learn as we go.

Looking back, I do not think I became any less of a veterinarian when I started spending more time on operations, leadership, communication, and workflow.

I just gained a better understanding of everything required to support that medicine in the first place.