#47: Vicarious trauma, burnout, and living with the critic inside your head. With Rhonda Andrews and Dr Louisa Johnson.

Vicarious trauma, burnout, and living with the critic inside your head is supported by Heska Australia. It's time to re-imagine how you run your in-house pathology and radiography. Visit https://www.heska.com.au/products/lab-diagnostics/ to discover how. 

In this conversation, we explore some ideas that we’re all familiar with, like how to live with those annoying self-critical voices that we all carry around inside our heads. Our guests, Rhonda Andrews and Dr Louisa Johnson also introduce us to some concepts that are brand new to us: cumulative trauma and vicarious trauma. Odds are that you'll recognise these culprits - those insidious, unexpected, sometimes small things that add up and add up and add up until they suddenly become overwhelming. But this is not a doom and gloom or fear-mongering episode. This conversation is ultimately about identifying risk factors and putting preventative actions in place to protect ourselves and our friends and colleagues.

Rhonda Andrews is a psychologist with almost 3 decades of experience. She’s also the Principal Psychologist and Managing Director of the Barrington Centre, which provides organisational and personal psychological services to a large number of sectors both in Australia and abroad, including government, education, legal, entertainment and emergency services. 

Recently Rhonda has partnered with one of our own: Dr Louisa Johnson. Dr Louisa is a veterinarian who has a special interest in staff welfare and new grad care and is also the founder of Safervets. Rhonda and Louisa have been working together to adapt The Systems of Support Program for the Veterinary Industry. System of support, or SoS - is a positive psychological health program that was designed for high-stress professions, and therefore a perfect fit for the vet world. It’s an evidence-based program that helps to reduce the negative psychological impacts associated with work that can lead to anxiety, burnout, depression... or worse. 

Barrington Centre:  (http://www.barrington-e2e.com/about_us/about_us.htm)

SoS Vet: https://www.barringtoncentre.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Systems-of-Support-for-Veterinary-Industry_Barrington-Centre.pdf

Safer Vets: (https://safervets.com/)

Go to https://thevetvault.com/podcasts/ for the show notes and to check out our guests’ favourite books, podcasts and everything else we talk about in the show.

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