Episode #87—Dr. Heather Case

The people of Animal Health Podcast features the incredible individuals I’ve had the privilege to connect with throughout my career. In each episode, you’ll hear their stories, their career journeys, leadership lessons, and the impact they’ve made on the industry. With a wide range of expert guests, you’ll gain insights, inspiration, and ideas you can apply to your own career. Thanks for tuning in, and enjoy the episode.

Welcome to The People of Animal Health Podcast. On this episode, we welcome Dr. Heather Case, who is a veterinarian, public health leader, and CEO of the International Council for Veterinary Assessment. Since 2014, she has overseen the North American Veterinary Licensing Examination, the licensing exam for veterinarians across the United States and Canada, otherwise known as the NAVLE. Her career spans clinical practice, science policy on Capitol Hill, disaster response following Hurricane Katrina, and leadership within the profession. A diplomat of preventative medicine and chair of the American Veterinary Medical Foundation. Dr. Case has dedicated her career to strengthening veterinary medicine and protecting animal and public health.

Heather, welcome onto The People of Animal Health Podcast, and how are you today?

Thank you so much, Stacy, for that warm welcome. It is my pleasure to be here, and I am well. Thank you again for the opportunity to be here with you.

Well, I’m so glad to have you here, and it’s so good to have this time with you. Heather, it is hard to believe it has been 12 years since I placed you in your current role where you oversee the NAVLE exam, and you are only the second person in the history of the ICVC to have this role. Isn’t that correct?

That is correct, yes. I was brought in when the founding CEO, Dr. John Boyce, retired, and that’s when our paths crossed that last time.

Well, Heather, let’s start off at the beginning. What was your life like growing up, and where did you grow up?

Yeah, I grew up in Eden Prairie, Minnesota. It is a suburb of Minneapolis. My mom was a nurse. My dad was an executive in the truck industry. I’m the youngest of three children. But both of my parents grew up on dairy farms in West Central Minnesota, and I spent a lot of time out on those farms. I felt like I wished I had grown up on a farm, but I spent as much time out there as I possibly could. I should also mention I was a painfully shy child as well.

Well, you have had a remarkably diverse career in private practice, public health, emergency response, policy, and now leading the ICVA. What originally inspired you to pursue veterinary medicine, and how did your career evolve in these different directions?

That’s a great question. It was actually out on the farm where my mother grew up. I know not all veterinarians can claim to be early adopters, I think that’s a term I’ve heard out there, but I am definitely one of those, and I know many of us do feel called to the profession. There was a moment that, again, I can remember like it was just yesterday out on the farm where my mom grew up, and a kitten had been injured. I remember I was holding the kitten, and I was talking to my grandmother asking her, “Who takes care of the kitties?” I understood, even at that young age, that I had gone to a doctor to take care of me. My grandma told me about what a veterinarian was. At that moment, as I mentioned, I knew I wanted to be a veterinarian and I never wavered.

I was a horse-crazy kid, and fortunate to have a horse when I was younger. Then I went on to the University of Minnesota, graduated from veterinary school, went on to an internship in equine-focused large animal medicine and surgery at the Ontario Veterinary College, fully anticipating that I would be a horse doctor for the rest of my career. When I completed my internship, I knew I wanted a residency, but at the time, there were a number of factors that landed me in a mixed-animal practice back in rural Minnesota as a horse doctor, but in an 11-doctor clinic.

At the time, I was the only woman in the practice of 11 doctors. I really had the opportunity to have an equine practice within the support of that mixed-animal practice. That was one of the first career shifts, if you will, because I didn’t realize how much I would enjoy mixed-animal practice. I ended up practicing on cows and everything, the turkey for the fair, certainly horses, but dogs and cats as well. I ended up doing quite a lot of small animal.

The other thing I would mention is I had been very active, Stacy, in organized veterinary medicine as a student. You’ll hear from many recent graduates, I’m sure to this day, how busy that first several years in practice really is, learning all of the things of being a clinically-practicing veterinarian. I hadn’t been really involved up until that point, but about six years in, I answered an ad from the Minnesota VMA. They were looking for a recent graduate to go to this conference in Chicago. I was in Minnesota thinking, “Well, that’s like going down south for the winter,” in January, I should add.

It was pre-cell phone date, so I called the office of the MVMA to express my interest. The executive director at the time was very kind, but she said, “I’m sorry, we’ve already found our recent graduate.” But before we hung up, she said, and it was almost like an afterthought, “Just one moment. I really like your initiative. Let me see if I can do something.” We hung up, she got back to me, and lo and behold, she’d found a second spot, an opportunity that had not existed. Again, that’s something that really shaped me in that moment, but what she said to me was, “Your initiative, I like it, and I’m going to see if I can find a way to get you to that conference.”

Well, Stacy, that conference was life-changing for me. I ended up then going as a recent graduate for the Minnesota VMA to the AVMA Leadership Conference. It was 2004. As you may or may not know, the AVMA Leadership Conference is a conference held every year in January in Chicago where the President, President Elect, the House of Delegates, all the leaders of the profession from across the different specialty groups, across the different state and allied groups, they’re all in that room. As a recent graduate in rural Minnesota coming to that, I was introduced to Dr. Daniel Lafontaine, who he’s passed away now but a mentor of mine and food safety veterinarian, from that meeting at the VLC.

He turned and he said to me, “Young lady, have you ever thought about a career in public health?” At the time, I really hadn’t. I was an equine veterinarian, mixed-animal practice, really didn’t know what that even meant. The next thing I know, he’s introducing me to Dr. Candace Jacobs who, at the time, was the food safety officer for Coca-Cola. I went, “Wait a minute, this isn’t the public health I remember from vet school.” Anyway, it was planting seeds.

Then on the way back to the airport from that trip, there was another individual I hadn’t met yet sitting next to me who found out I was from Minnesota, and said, “Oh, by the way, there’s a new preventive medicine residency that they’re developing in public health at Minnesota. Did you know about that?” Well, long story short, I didn’t know about it, but I was curious and so I looked into it. I was in the second class at the University of Minnesota Center for Animal Health and Food Safety and their public health residency.

While I was there is when I really started to see that there was more to this world of public health than I could ever have imagined to include policy and discussion across different organizations. That’s really also when I signed up to be a disaster responder. I found myself in a residency where I had a little bit more flexibility in my schedule than I had as a practitioner in terms of on-call schedules and things like that. I was at a training with our newly minted team. We were a team that the AVMA was supporting at the time called the Veterinary Medical Assistance Teams. We were in a training in late August of 2005. In fact, we were training together when landfall happened during Hurricane Katrina, and so ended up deploying and having that experience, which then led to serving as a disaster coordinator for the AVMA later in my career.

There are a lot more details to the story, but I have always followed the curiosity and opportunities that present themselves. That has led me to some really interesting career opportunities within this wonderful profession of veterinary medicine.

Well, Heather, as CEO of the International Council for Veterinary Assessment, you oversee the North America Veterinary Licensing Examination. For listeners who may not fully understand it, can you walk through the role that NAVLE plays in ensuring competency and public trust in veterinary medicine?

Absolutely. I want to start by just making sure people know that the ICVA is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization, and I share that because I am in a leadership role for a service-oriented organization. We have 13 board of directors. It’s quite interesting as far as organized veterinary medicine goes in terms of we have on our board designated members from the American Association of Veterinary Medical Colleges. We have two individuals from there. We have one from the American Veterinary Medical Association’s Council on Education. I have four designees, three from the regulatory community and one public member from the American Association of Veterinary State Boards, and then one designee as well from the Canadian National Examining Board. In addition, there are five at-large members for volunteers from across the breadth of veterinary medicine.

But I share that because the NAVLE is a key step in becoming a licensed veterinarian. All the regulatory bodies in the United States and Canada utilize NAVLE for licensure purposes. It’s designated to ensure that every candidate needs a standard for competency for safe, effective entry-level practice. I mentioned there’s a member of the public on our board of directors, and the NAVLE is the tool that those licensing boards use to assure public protection, animal health, and safety and welfare.

What’s important to understand as well is that we don’t create the exam in isolation, as I’ve just mentioned, the board members that serve on the board. But since the early 2000s, late ’90s, in fact, last fall’s fall administration was our commemorating the 25th anniversary of NAVLE so we’re in a celebration of… Well, some wouldn’t maybe call it a celebration, I suppose, but we are commemorating the 25th anniversary of NAVLE.

We’ve been working with the National Board of Medical Examiners on that exam. The National Board of Medical Examiners are the nonprofit who work on the USMLE exam that is the counterpart like the NAVLE for physicians. It’s created through a comprehensive survey of veterinarians across the US and Canada. It’s written at entry level in this lens of public safety, and so at that what we call minimally proficient benchmark. We do a lot of crossing of T’s and dotting of I’s to ensure it’s rigorous, that there’s a multi-step process with our trained subject matter experts from across veterinary medicine with multiple layers of review to ensure that those licensing boards can be assured of the validity and reliability of that exam.

Well, congratulations on 25 years.

Thank you, yeah. I probably shouldn’t say, but I’m about to, that I actually took its predecessor, which tells you I went to school when I was five or didn’t.

Well, the NAVLE is taken by thousands of veterinary graduates every year. What are some of the biggest challenges in designing an exam that fairly assesses clinical judgment across multiple species and practice settings?

Yeah, so I would frame it less maybe as challenges, more as important considerations that would shape how we develop NAVLE. As I was just mentioning, or hopefully would gain from what I was just sharing, the process is intentionally transparent, fair, and rigorous. It’s meant to reflect real-world entry-level clinical practice, and so one of our key considerations is, as you’ve just mentioned, the breadth of the profession. Our exam needs to cover multiple species and the clinical scenarios focusing on what those practicing veterinarians in the field, what they believe an entry-level veterinarian needs to know.

The way we do that, I mentioned a moment ago, we do a practice analysis, which is a survey. We’re actually right in the middle of our practice analysis process now. As a best practice for high-stakes licensure exam development, about every 7 to 10 years, you need to go out to the profession that you’re assessing. You need to ask them, “What is it that your profession needs to know?”

In the instance of veterinary medicine, as we know, it’s not one species, right? I mean, bovine dairy is different than bovine beef, as an example. We work very closely with partners, like the AVMA and the Canadian VMA, and we’re in that process right now. There’s a survey that will be launched to the veterinary community, we’re targeting early May of this year, to ask those veterinarians practicing in those areas of their profession. We’re specifically asking horse veterinarians, “What are horse vets? What do they need to know at entry level?” We’re asking exotic animal veterinarians, “What do entry-level veterinarians in your area need to know?”

That is critical that we A, engage the profession. How we build the test is built off of the blueprint that comes from the response and results from these volunteers, these subject matter experts that are participating in this process. That is what we’re doing then there, is we’re, of course, engaging veterinarians from across the disciplines, regions, areas of practice. We’re also asking them, “Are you engaging with recent graduates? Do you have knowledge of what that entry-level lens looks like?” to ensure that we are appropriately assessing in a standardized way and capturing what it is that veterinarians need to know on the NAVLE

Well, ICVA recently expanded the NAVLE from two testing windows to three each year. What drove that decision, and how does it help new graduates entering the profession?

Yeah, it was interesting. In about 2020, and independent really of what was happening with COVID, we are, of course, an essential profession, and so we continued to test for NAVLE during the COVID. There was no shutdown. It was around 2020-ish when our testing centers came to us and said, “We’re noticing increased numbers of candidates. We want to be proactive. There seems to be a trend here.” We certainly were also watching that.

Many people may or may not be aware. I mean, we all have heard of the shortage of practitioners. We’re fully aware that there are needs. The schools have been increasing their class sizes and, of course, there have been many new schools coming online as well. One of our responsibilities we really feel to be responsive to candidates, the schools, and the regulatory boards is to keep track of those numbers, and so I do have just some numbers here for you.

For example, in 2015, we tested about 5,600 candidates who were taking the NAVLE. If we look at that number last fall in 2025, we had about 9,600 candidates taking the NAVLE. Expanding to three testing windows was driven by our commitment to support candidates and directly respond really to the feedback from students, candidates, and veterinary schools. But we also knew we had traditionally offered one fall testing window and then one in the spring. The intention is to provide opportunities for candidates to take the exam twice before graduation. What we’ve done is we’ve now added a summer window. The idea is that it would allow additional flexibility for candidates, but also address these increased numbers.

That’s fantastic that there’s a third window now. Well, you announced an independent audit of the NAVLE process. Why is transparency and validation so important in high-stakes professional examinations?

Yeah, transparency and validation are essential in any high-stakes licensing exam because they’re really the foundation of that public trust and professional confidence. As we’ve talked about already, the NAVLE is that cornerstone assessment for licensure. We think it’s really critical that candidates, educators, the public, the broader veterinary community can be confident in its rigor, fairness, and impartiality. While we stand firmly behind the integrity of NAVLE, the initiation of an independent audit is really part of our commitment to its continuous improvement and accountability, and to ensure that the exam continues to meet the highest professional testing standards.

It’s also an opportunity though for us to provide additional objective validation of many processes that we have, many crossing of T’s, dotting of I’s that are best practices in high-stakes assessment development, everything from development all the way throughout scoring. Ultimately, it’s really about reinforcing trust, ensuring that every candidate knows that the exam is fair, and that the profession and public can have confidence in the veterinarians it’s helping to license.

That makes sense. Looking ahead, how do you see veterinary assessment and licensure evolving over the next decade as technology, education models, and workforce needs continue to change?

Yeah, I think it’s interesting. We’re really at a unique time in the world, the rate of change, the rapid speed of change, everything, all these things that are going to be impacting, I think, all of us in every profession out there. But I think what we know is that veterinary assessment is going to be grounded in the same core principle of ensuring safe, competent, entry-level practice that will continue to protect the public and the animals that we serve.

But as technology, education models, and workforces shift, we think it’ll be even more important that licensure exams like NAVLE remain consistent and an objective benchmark for competency across all candidates. At ICVA, we’re committed to ensuring that the exam is transparent and fair, and that candidates as well can have resources available to help them prepare with confidence.

We’ll continue to prioritize our ongoing process. It’s a continuous process. We are always looking from the practice analysis survey to building the blueprint. Then we go into a process, and we haven’t talked a lot about that, but it’s an exam where we are pretesting questions to ensure that they’re valid and reliable. They’re pretested actually on the exam with candidates so that, again, we’re crossing the T’s and dotting the I’s at a rigorous process. Once they’ve been pretested and deemed that they’re appropriate to go on the test and count towards a candidate’s score, we start the process all over again. We do a review of the content. It’s a constant continuous evaluation.

Again, I guess while the tools and approaches might evolve, our mission will remain the same to deliver a rigorous, fair, and trusted assessment, supporting candidates and upholding the integrity of veterinary licensure.

Heather, before ICVA, you were deeply involved in disaster response and deployed after Hurricane Katrina, like you mentioned earlier. Can you share what it was like serving as commander of shelter medicine for thousands of displaced animals?

Yeah, that was a point I mentioned earlier when we were talking, I made that. That was an opportunity that presented itself to me as I was a resident. I want to just say a little bit more about that. I’ve had several things, including your phone call to me about this particular position, where an opportunity presents itself and you’re not sure where it’s going to lead you, much like going to the leadership conference that January so many years ago.

I ended up having a big portion of my career involving disaster preparedness and response, in part because I saw an application on one of my colleagues’ desks for a disaster response program. I had just entered the residency in Minnesota coming out of mixed-animal clinical practice. Didn’t know what role veterinarians had in disaster response.

Then as I mentioned to you, I was at an early training of this team when Hurricane Katrina, arguably one of the largest disasters that this country has ever faced, if not to this day — I mean, that animal shelter is still considered one of the largest we’ve ever housed — happened right as I was getting involved. I deployed then down to Lamar Dixon. It was a horse show facility that, on any other day, I would’ve loved showing my horse there. It was not the kind of environment that I think everyone would take to.

Veterinarians, in general, I think we are ideally trained to be responders. I think especially with my mixed animal background, it wasn’t unusual when I was in full-time practice to be faced with a horse or a cow in a back 40, a field with the headlights of my truck, no electricity, very minimal opportunity to do any sort of diagnostics and things like that. Yet you have an animal in front of you that is needing assistance. I did find that that was a field that I was able to operate quite well in.

But what was really interesting about the response to Katrina is that was the first place that someone else saw leadership opportunity or leadership skills rather in me. I had deployed down to Hurricane Katrina as just a member of the team, and fairly quickly within my deployment, I was asked to step into this commander role. What we had done, the VMAT teams were coordinating with many other volunteers in that huge operation. As I mentioned, there were over 10,000 animals that went through the doors of that facility in about 30 days.

But we had some critically injured animals or animals that we were treating in more of an ICU-type space. That was one of my team members was the commander of that space. Then all of the other animals that were throughout the shelter, we likened them to if a client brought you an animal in a practice, you put them on some medication, sent them home, and were going to monitor them for a while. We had thousands of animals in that shelter.

Really, as I mentioned, it was a… I don’t want to necessarily say transformative time for me, but it was the first time that someone else saw leadership as an option for me, asked me to be a leader, and I really had a decision of whether I was going to step up or not step up. That decision then transferred, as I mentioned earlier, into when I finished my residency, I went on to a congressional fellowship in DC. At the end of that, had an opportunity to go work at the AVMA because of that experience at Hurricane Katrina. It certainly changed the trajectory of my career, for sure.

I love that. Wow. Well, experiences like Katrina changed how the veterinary profession thinks about emergency preparedness. What lessons from that response still influence veterinary disaster planning today?

Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, out of Hurricane Katrina came what is known as The PETS Act, the Pet Evacuation and Transportation Standards Act, and it was passed very swiftly. What we recognized as a society was that animals are connected to their people. The human animal bond is so important. From Katrina, many lessons have been learned. It’s hard to believe it’s been over 20 years since that disaster. We’ve certainly made great strides in terms of preparing for humans and their animals in terms of evacuation. We’ve made great strides, as I’ve mentioned, in terms of having communities thinking about what happens if we have a disaster, how are we going to evacuate the people and their pets? How are we going to ensure that human lives are safe because they’re not going back to retrieve animals that they have not been allowed to take with them? I think we have learned a lot.

I think one of the challenges that we have, both in emergency preparedness and response and in public health, is that when things are calm, when things are going well, when the plans are prepared but we’re not in the face of a disaster, it’s sometimes easy to forget how important it is to plan for these things. One of the biggest disasters that we see in this country is actually a structural fire. Unfortunately, those are more common than we would like to think. It’s still the idea that we need to be planning ahead, thinking about how are we going to evacuate.

Quite honestly, veterinarians play a critical role. Whether you’re part of a disaster response team or are simply a veterinarian in the community, you’re looked to as a leader and you have resources to help your clients think about these things, about how they’re going to plan if they had to evacuate, if there was a flood or a chemical spill from a train derailment, those sorts of things. Things that we don’t necessarily want to think about, but what I always used to say and still say is, “Preparedness is peace of mind.” I think we just need to keep reminding ourselves of the importance of preparing for our pets and making sure that our clients are prepared for our pets.

Of course, it goes beyond just pets. It goes to ensuring that livestock are protected from disease outbreak. I mean, disaster preparedness is a very broad field, of course.

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Well, Heather, you also served as an AAAS AVMA congressional fellow working in the US House of Representatives. How did that experience shape your understanding of the intersection between science, policy, and veterinary medicine?

Yeah, I was really fortunate to have that opportunity. When I finished my residency, I actually had a job offer in the turkey industry. I had done my master’s thesis working in the turkey industry. I had learned about the opportunity of the congressional fellowship that AVMA supports at the AVMA Leadership Conference. I had put my hat in the ring and had that opportunity to work for a year for the congressman.

Two things, one is I saw firsthand how important it is for veterinarians to be fully engaged in that process. We are the experts and we are, I think, uniquely qualified because of our interface between human and animal health, because of our understanding of preventive medicine. That’s for all veterinarians, right? Veterinarians are the only health profession that take an oath to public health. Whether you’re a preventive medicine specialist or a practicing veterinarian, we all have that responsibility. I just really saw the value of veterinarians needing to be present in that process and speaking on behalf of not only our profession, but the public that we serve. That was also a really pivotal experience for me in my career path.

In addition to your ICVA role, you currently serve as chair of the American Veterinary Medical Foundation. What are some of the foundation’s priorities right now, especially when it comes to disaster relief and advancing animal welfare?

Yeah. Well, thank you for that question. I have been very fortunate to continue my passion for disaster preparedness and response in many ways through my work with the foundation. It’s funding from the foundation that supported the disaster response team that I volunteered on before I went to be on staff at AVMA. Then it’s a full-circle moment for me now to be able to volunteer my time for the foundation.

We have really three focus areas that we have at the moment. We have our AVMA REACH Program, which is an opportunity for AVMA members to provide care when client finances are standing in the way from being able to take care of a pet. Then as you’ve mentioned, the Disaster Relief Program, we have two grants available. One is for veterinarians who are responding in their community. As I was mentioning earlier, certainly, we have many amazing veterinarians who do unbelievably amazing things in the wake of a disaster. Certainly, we hear often about, as an example, the wildfires in California. We’ve had many veterinarians go above and beyond to ensure care for animals impacted by those types of disasters. I’m very proud of the work that the foundation has. We have up to $7,500 available to veterinarians who would do that work. It’s a reimbursement grant, and there’s information on the foundation’s website.

But then we also have a grant that is for veterinarians impacted by disaster. We recently expanded that. We understand how important the team is. Now, it’s a grant that’s available not just to a veterinarian, but a veterinarian or any member of their team. That’s up to a $3,000 grant basically to cover basic necessities for someone who is impacted, say, by a house fire or flooding or something. We’re wanting to be able to stand it up for those veterinarians to cover temporary housing, food, clothing, shelter, whatever we can do in that tragedy to help them as they move forward.

But then the other thing that the foundation does that I’m really committed to is that we provide significant grants and scholarships. Of course, as we look to the next generation of veterinarians, that’s something that I’m also very passionate about.

Well, Heather, what’s been the most surprising thing to you during your career in the veterinary profession?

Yeah, I think I really did go to vet school with blinders on. Of course, you don’t know what you don’t know, but I really thought I was going to practice clinically, first and foremost, regardless of what type of practice. I really thought I would practice clinically. I have been surprised, I probably even used that word during the course of our conversation here multiple times, of the opportunities that presented themselves to me. I know I am not unique in that, that there are so many places for veterinarians, and we don’t know what we enjoy until we have an opportunity to give that a try.

I sometimes start a presentation with, “Yeah, my whole career I was working towards to somehow be able to work in veterinary assessment.” I mean, I didn’t even know that was an option. I think I said to you earlier, Stacy, that when you did call me for this position that I’m in now, we had that conversation 12 years ago, I didn’t really know. I took the predecessor of NAVLE, so I didn’t really know NAVLE and I wasn’t really sure about what that position might be. Of course, you always do a great job of supporting people when you’re talking with us. I kept going through that process of learning more about what the opportunity was. Here we are 12 years later, and I can’t tell you how rewarding it has been.

The surprise is I just follow my passion, I follow what is of interest, and I’m curious to see what unfolds next. I mean, I just think it’s a constant surprise because there’s so many wonderful things that I have already experienced, and I’m really looking forward to see what comes next.

Well, you told me earlier, before we started the podcast, that you still have that voicemail saved of the voicemail when I called you 12 years ago. You’ll have to share that with me.

I absolutely will. It was a very pivotal moment in my career. I can’t stress enough how, when you first called, I really didn’t think I was going to be interested. I know I’m being pretty candid here, but I’m sharing the fact of the matter was I didn’t know what I didn’t know on that first phone call. It was a lengthy process, as often those searches are, and so there were different stages. There were questions that were asked, and then there were conversations that happened. Every time I got to the next step, I heard something more that intrigued me.

One of the things that I absolutely love about what I do today is that I have the opportunity to serve veterinary medicine. I call it the House of Veterinary Medicine. I mentioned at the beginning that we have all these different organizations represented designating people to our board of directors. I feel very privileged and it’s a high responsibility that we hear what our constituents, I guess I could call them, we call them the House and Partners, the House of Veterinary Medicine, that we hear what they need. Through our volunteers because of the breadth of the work that we do, I really get to keep my finger on the pulse of a lot of the things that are happening in veterinary medicine. I just feel really grateful to have that opportunity.

Well, you’ve had such an interesting career path. Yesterday, I was at Oklahoma State University talking with 52 vet school students, and I said to them, “Many of you are here thinking that you’re going to spend your career in practice.” I said, “There are so many opportunities in our profession outside of clinical practice,” and you’ve had multiple very interesting positions. I’m curious, how have you seen the profession change over the years since you’ve been involved?

Yeah, I think that we are a very adaptable profession. I am not a tech expert. I am not an expert with AI. I know that that learning curve, I know that that change and rate of change is coming. The one thing I will say, and I’m very proud of veterinary medicine for, Stacy Pritt and I did a commentary in JAVMA about the opportunities outside of clinical practice a few years ago. We talked about how we’re an adaptable profession. We are often in a situation where we don’t have all the information. I talked about being a mixed-animal practitioner. We’re given snippets, bits, and pieces, there’s an animal, and we need to make fast decisions in the interest of helping that animal and the people that are bonded to it.

From changing over the years, once upon a time, we were horse doctors. That’s how we started our commentary. The automobile came out, and at that point, there were some who wondered what the future of veterinary medicine was going to look like. Gosh darn it, maybe there wouldn’t be one. It was interesting as we were doing our research for that commentary. Of course, both of us very passionate about the opportunities outside of clinical practice. Just to be clear, I am still a licensed, accredited veterinarian and I love clinical practice, but it’s just fun that there are these different things, right?

But what we learned when we were doing that commentary is that, and I guess it’s not surprising now, back in the day when the horses were going away, we were really more large-animal focused, and the schools were all teaching to the horse, which as a horse veterinarian is music to my ears, by the way, small animals, nobody was teaching that in the vet schools. It wasn’t a thing. It wasn’t a field. In fact, it was some rogue side people, is what I was told, that we’re learning how to treat cats and dogs, and figure out what companion animal medicine might look like.

I guess what I’m saying is when you ask about how the profession has changed, it’s obviously changed dramatically since that time. But even in the last five years, I have noticed a palpable difference in the circles where I tend to hang out, a better understanding and appreciation truly of our role at that interface between human and animal health and the one-health concept. It’s music to my ears to help us all understand. We are all one-health practitioners as veterinarians. You can’t really not understand, particularly post-COVID, how the interface between human and animals, the current influenza outbreak… I mean, I think there’s better understanding, not just within veterinary medicine but within society, about the role of veterinarians and what we do in terms of one-health and all health.

What does your crystal ball say about the future of the veterinary profession?

I think it is an exciting time to be a human being on this planet. I think that we have some challenges, for sure. We have shortages. When those words are discussed, I mean, we know that it’s in certain parts of the profession, but I’m also seeing increased numbers of candidates coming through the schools. I know we have five generations in the workforce at the moment. I just think that there’s an opportunity for really smart people to roll up our sleeves and take a look at how are we incorporating societal needs, how are we incorporating technology, how are we incorporating various interests from across vastly different generations? I think it’s an exciting time to be in veterinary medicine. I am really excited, especially when I have the opportunity to engage with the next generation, as it sounds like you did just recently, because there’s a lot of great energy there.

But I think we do have to keep our eyes open. I think we have to push ourselves outside of our comfort zones. I think we have to remind ourselves that there have been times in the past when we weren’t sure what our role was going to be next in terms of, I’m referring to, again, horse doctors moving into small animal. I think the world is evolving and I think that we, because of how we’re trained, because many of the things I have already said, we don’t always have all the information as practitioners, but yet we’re doing the best we can. We have to have critical thinking skills. We have to be making decisions. I think we are uniquely qualified to help move that story forward.

Heather, what advice would you give the younger version of yourself?

Well, the first thing that comes to mind is to just breathe. I think many people would love to tell their younger selves, “It’s going to be just fine. It’s going to be just fine.” I think that that is really something that I could have used when I was younger. I think there’s even a book about it called Just Enjoy the Ride. It’s all going to work out, and just breathe.

Well, what message or principle do you wish you could teach everyone listening to our podcast today?

I am a very curious person, and that has served me well, but I think we all have things that we hear or read or see where it sparks something. It’s not the same for anybody. Everybody is unique in that. What I would love is if people could, A, stay open to opportunities, exploring things. If something sounds intriguing, looking into it further. I just think that it’s important to stay curious and open because you’d never know where that might lead you.

That’s such good advice. Well, Heather, you’ve got the mic. What is one thing that you want to share with our listeners of The People of Animal Health Podcasts before you drop the mic today?

Yeah. There’s a quote, and I’m going to paraphrase it. I’ve spent my career in organized veterinary medicine and the not-for-profit space, but it’s essentially Margaret Mead who said never doubt that a small group of dedicated people can change the world. In fact, it is the only thing that ever has. We’re each unique and different, and we’re all drops in the ocean, making an impact, doing our one thing that we do, and doing it the best we can. In fact, the congressman, I asked him when I walked out of his office for the last time, I said a similar thing, “What is the one thing you would recommend to me?” and I’ve adopted it. His comment was, “Heather, whatever you’re doing, do your best. It will serve you well.”

Well, that’s good advice. Do your best. Heather, you are certainly making an impact on our profession, and I appreciate all the work that you’re doing. Thank you for being my guest today on The People of Animal Health Podcast. It was a pleasure to have you here today.

Thank you very much, Stacy. It was my honor.