A Vet Space Ireland podcast conversation with Vet Assist founder Melanie O’Donoghue on practice design, team utilisation and building a long career in veterinary nursing

In the latest episode of the Vet Space Ireland podcast, hosts Michelle Maguire and Evelyn Coleman sat down with Melanie O’Donoghue, a registered veterinary nurse and founder of Vet Assist, the practice design and business development consultancy she set up in 2003. Over more than three decades in the profession, Melanie has moved between clinical practice, industry, education and consultancy, and the conversation ranged widely: from the earliest days of veterinary nurse training in Ireland to the practical, day to day decisions that determine whether a practice team functions well or badly.

What emerged was a consistent thread. Good practice design, in Melanie’s telling, is not primarily about bricks and mortar. It is about building a working environment and a team structure that lets every member of staff, vet, nurse and support team alike, work to the top of their skill set.

From the register to the boardroom

Melanie’s route into veterinary nursing began early. Having decided on a veterinary career from childhood, she trained in the pre UCD era of Irish veterinary nurse education, attending evening lectures at the old vet school and in Kevin Street while working full time in practice. Finding the informal structure of the course unreliable, she moved to the UK to complete her qualification at Berkshire College of Agriculture, joining the RCVS register in 1995 before transferring to the Irish register in 2008.

After qualifying, Melanie worked in UK and Irish practice before an unplanned move into industry, selling veterinary anaesthetic equipment for a company that had recently acquired Burtons and other veterinary equipment lines. The role took her into practices across the country during the transition many mixed practices were making from farm animal to small animal work, and it was here, delivering training alongside equipment sales, that she first saw the gap in the market that would become Vet Assist.

“I could see the opportunity in Ireland at the time where this transition was happening from farm animal into small animal.”

Vet Assist: practice design as a business discipline

Melanie founded Vet Assist in 2003, two years ahead of the Veterinary Practice Act 2005, which made practice premises accreditation mandatory for the first time. That timing meant she had already built up practical experience in practice layout before demand for accreditation support increased sharply. To date, she has worked with more than 300 Irish practices on their premises design.

Vet Assist has since grown into a broader business development consultancy, but Melanie is clear that design and team function are inseparable. Every layout decision, she explained, should be made with the working team and the caseload in mind, not simply the species being treated. Modern practice design has moved away from multifunctional rooms towards dedicated spaces, a separate dental suite, surgical suite, X-ray and ultrasound room, so that a single team can run more than one procedure at once. A well-resourced team, in her framing, is one vet, two nurses and one support team member able to split into two working pairs simultaneously, rather than a single overseeing clinician moving from task to task.

Consult rooms and kennel or ward space, she added, are the two areas practices most need to prioritise, since one drives new business through the door and the other holds it once it arrives.

The two issues that show up in every practice

Asked what she sees repeatedly when she walks into a new practice, Melanie did not hesitate: communication. It is, she said, the first section of every report she produces, because even practices that communicate well at one level often have gaps further down the team. Close behind is team organisation, a legacy in many cases of how mixed practices grew historically, with staff pulled in as needed rather than structured around clear roles. The result, still visible in some practices today, is an uneven workload and a team that has never had the chance to be matched to its strengths.

Her approach is to survey the team directly, feeding anonymised staff suggestions into the written report so that recommendations carry visible buy in rather than being handed down. She also argues strongly for the practice manager role as non-negotiable, freeing practice principals from HR, financial reporting and P&L management so they can work on the business rather than only in it.

“There’s no downside to looking at your team dynamics and efficiency.”

Putting a value on the veterinary nurse

A central theme of the conversation was the underuse of veterinary nurses’ clinical skill set, and its link to nurse retention, which both hosts and guest described as a significant issue for the profession. Melanie pointed to the framework set out in the Veterinary Practice Act 2005, where nursing tasks are defined as being carried out either in the presence of or under the direction of a veterinary practitioner, as giving Irish practices considerable scope to roster nurses onto follow up vaccinations, osteoarthritis and skin injections, post operative checks and weight checks, once the animal has first been seen and diagnosed by a vet on the premises.

She was emphatic that this work should always be charged for. Nurse consults, she argued, should never be described as free, since doing so undermines the professional and financial value of the service. Her recommended system is a dedicated nurse consult column in the practice management software, a clear standard operating procedure on what can and cannot be booked as a nurse appointment, and a reception team briefed to ask the right questions. The simplest safeguard, she noted, is ensuring every client leaves an appointment with their follow up already booked, since a vet’s own recommendation is the strongest driver of nurse consult uptake.

Rostering nurses onto consults in this way, she suggested, also has a secondary benefit: reducing the volume of follow up phone calls into reception by booking appointments at the point of first contact rather than leaving clients to call back.

A long career built on diversifying

Both hosts noted that Melanie’s own career, spanning clinical practice, equipment sales, digital marketing training, an HR management diploma completed during COVID, and now consultancy and public speaking, reflects a pattern increasingly common among Irish veterinary nurses who move between clinical work and adjacent specialisms over time.

Her advice to nurses considering a similar path was direct: identify a strength or an area of genuine interest, pursue further training through the wide range of courses now available in Ireland, whether online, part time or full time, and treat any setback as information rather than failure. Leadership and management training in particular, she suggested, transfers well beyond a single practice or even beyond veterinary work altogether, giving nurses a route to progress without necessarily leaving clinical work behind entirely, as she herself has continued to take consults.

“Education is never a waste, because you never know how one thing will lead to another.”

She was equally clear that diversifying had helped extend her own career in a physically demanding profession and encouraged other nurses to consider part time clinical work alongside a second area of interest as a way of protecting both wellbeing and longevity in the sector, rather than persisting in a role that no longer felt sustainable.

Listen to the full episode

This article summarises key themes from a wide-ranging conversation on the Vet Space Ireland podcast. The full episode covers additional ground on nurse mentoring, team leadership approaches and Melanie’s broader consultancy work with Irish practices and is available on all major podcast platforms and at vetspaceireland.ie.

Listen Here

Article written by Vet Space Ireland

To contribute to the Vet Space Journal, appear on the podcast, or get involved with VSI, contact us at inspire@vetspaceireland.ie or visit vetspaceireland.ie

Vet Space Ireland is a non-profit, volunteer-powered veterinary community platform. Founded 2019.