In this episode, Dr. Andy Roark welcomes Dr. Phil Richmond, founder of Flourishing Phoenix, to dive into the U.S. Surgeon General’s Framework for Mental Health in the Workplace. They discuss how veterinary practices can address psychosocial hazards, implement effective risk assessments, and foster a culture of wellbeing that supports teams without creating unnecessary stress. You’ll gain actionable insights into leadership strategies, the PERMA framework, and practical ways to enhance connection, recognition, and resilience in your practice. If you’re ready to prioritize mental health and build a thriving veterinary workplace, this episode is for you. Let’s get into this episode!
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LINKS
Workplace Wellbeing Study Referenced
Dr. Andy Roark Charming the Angry Client Team Training Course
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ABOUT OUR GUEST
Dr. Philip Richmond is the Founder and Chief Consultant of Flourishing Phoenix Veterinary Consultants, LLC. As a practicing vet, he champions a positive work culture, emphasizing psychological health, safety, and wellbeing in veterinary settings. He has taken pivotal roles in both state and global initiatives to promote workplace wellbeing in veterinary medicine. Among his roles, Dr. Richmond has served as Chief Medical and Wellbeing Officer for Veterinary United and currently chairs the Florida Veterinary Medical Association’s Professional Wellbeing Committee. Beyond his advocacy, he contributes as a writer, speaker, and podcast guest, and has earned various certifications in positive psychology, workplace wellbeing, and suicide prevention. Dr. Richmond is a speaker and published writer, including having co-authored “Psychological Health and Safety Guidelines” from Veterinary Visionaries. He is a frequent veterinary podcast guest and holds multiple certifications in applied positive psychology, appreciative inquiry, workplace wellbeing, psychological health & safety, trauma-informed workplaces, resilience training, behavior change, and suicide prevention. He has been awarded the FVMA Gold Star, FVMA Veterinarian of the Year, Uncharted Veterinary Community Founder’s Award, Blue Buffalo Together for Pets Award, and a finalist for the US Bright Minds Veterinary Wellness Champion Award.
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Dr. Andy Roark: Welcome everybody to the Cone of Shame Veterinary podcast. I am your host. Dr. Andy Roark guys. I am here with my good friend Dr. Phil Richmond.
We are talking about the surgeon general’s framework for mental health and being in the workplace that was just released a couple of months ago, and then we get into psychosocial hazards and how to do psychosocial risk assessment and what that looks like and so a lot of this is about understanding what do our people actually need and how do we create a workplace that’s more supportive of them without making them feel like they’re living in danger?
And we get into that a lot. And that’s a thing for me is I really want to be very supportive of our people. But I don’t think it’s healthy for us to tell people that their job is grinding them down. And that, medicine is a toxic place to be. I don’t believe that. And I don’t think it’s, I don’t think it’s healthy to tell people that.
And we talk really about what is psychosocial risk assessment and how do you do it in a way that gets results and supports the team without them feeling like they’re living in a state of, mental health monitoring.
Anyway, it’s a great episode. I think you’ll enjoy it. I hope you’ll enjoy it. Thanks to Dr. Phil Richmond for being here. Let’s get into this episode.
Kelsey Beth Carpenter: This is your show. We’re glad you’re here. We want to help you in your veterinary career. Welcome to the Cone of Shame with Dr. Andy Roark.
Dr. Andy Roark: Welcome to the podcast, Dr. Phil Richmond. How are you, my friend?
Dr. Phil Richmond: I’m good. Dr. Andy Roark. How are you, sir?
Dr. Andy Roark: I’m doing great. I love getting to talk to you on the podcast. You and I talk on the phone quite a lot.
Dr. Phil Richmond: Oh, we do.
Dr. Andy Roark: Probably we text, we talk, we, are in, we are, I was gonna say incommunicado, that means not
Dr. Phil Richmond: We’re we’re incommunicado.
Dr. Andy Roark: We are mucho comunicado, you and I. You my favorite people, persons, people of interest. You’re one of my favorite peeps to talk to because you are a thinker and a seeker You are the founder of Flourishing Phoenix, which is a consultancy that you run.
You do a ton of service work in our community around substance abuse, but also mental health and wellness. You’re very involved with the Florida Veterinary Medical Association. You are speaking nationally and internationally. You’ve spoken for me at Uncharted Veterinary Conference, things like that. Yeah, you are just generally a person I
respect a lot of and who I like to hear your ideas and opinions, which is why I reached out to you when I saw that the surgeon general had released the surgeon general’s framework for mental health and being in the workplace place.
This was released just in the last couple of months. And the surgeon general was laying down mental health wellness in the workplace guidelines. And I wanted to talk them through with you real quick and then start to, to get a clearer picture of kind of what this looks like in that medicine, where we are.
Dr. Phil Richmond: Yeah. A hundred percent.
Dr. Andy Roark: I’ll put a link to the, in the show notes to the surgeon general’s framework for people who want to see it, basically they’ve got five essentials. That they, that the Surgeon General has put forward. The first one is protection from harm, right? Prioritizing workplace, physical and psychological safety, enabling adequate rest, normalizing and supporting a focus on mental health operationalized diversity, equity, inclusion, accessibility.
That’s number one. Number two is connection and community. Create cultures of inclusion and belonging, cultivate trusted relationships work. Number three is work life harmony, right? Provide more autonomy over how work is done, make schedules flexible and predictable as possible, increase access to paid leave.
Number four is mattering at work. So providing a living wage, engaging workers in workplace decisions, building a culture of gratitude and recognition, connecting individual work with organizational mission. And the last is number five opportunities for growth, offer quality training, education, and mentoring, foster clear, equitable pathways for career advancement, stuff like that. And my, reaction when I saw it was I like a lot of these things. I was a little bit taken a back in that when I look at this, it’s presented very much and then granted, this is for the workplace. I really think that success and wellness has got to be a mixture of workplace initiatives and personal initiatives.
I think the, point I made when I talked to you at the very beginning was I don’t think that it’s possible as a business owner, as a workplace, to take an employee who is stressing out all day long and then goes home. And drinks a dozen beers and scroll social media until four in the morning, sleeps 90 minutes and then comes back to work Like I don’t know that we can offer wellness for that person. There’s got to be some sort of personal ownership of wellness But at the same time I think the idea that we say to our employees look You guys need to practice resilience now get back in there get yelled at. That’s not acceptable. That’s not helpful.
Dr. Phil Richmond: Yeah, absolutely, and so let me say this is that we in the United States, we are, we’re a smidgen behind everybody else. And I, want to say this, I love what the surgeon general put out but we are a number of years behind other countries. A number of years ago, I think it was in 2021 the, it’s like the international OSHA put out the ISO 45 zero zero three, which is the guidelines for psychological health and safety in, workplaces.
And so essentially that is that in our workplaces, we need to create an environment that mitigates harm, protects people from harm, but also promotes flourishing like that. We have to have those two things. And so I think the, surgeon general’s work really highlights that what it doesn’t get into as much.
And this is to your point, is that the other aspect of psychological health and safety workplace wellbeing, creating a flourishing, positive environment,
there are, three aspects to it and we like to call it Dr. Aaron Jarden in Australia, he, calls it the me, the we, and the us.
So there’s an individual responsibility tier point, a team slash leadership. Level of responsibility and an organizational level of responsibility. So that I think ties everything together with what you’re saying is that it’s not enough. I can have all the policies I can create an environment for team, team cohesion.
My leaders can be positive individuals. But if I, as a, as an individual, if I have a huge negativity bias and I don’t see what I’m bringing to the table, it’s not going to work. And then the flip side is too, is that I can have all the skills of resiliency in the world. But if I’m, I jokingly say, the Dalai Lama, went into a veterinary practice was a veterinarian and had to see 15 minute appointments and was quadruple booked on a Saturday he might utter the F word, and not all respect to his holiness, the Dalai Lama, but just saying what resilience can’t overcome is huge, unachievable job demands. It can overcome poor leadership. It can overcome poor change management. It can overcome some of these things, but we do need all of those in concert to create a flourishing environment.
Dr. Andy Roark: Where do you see the biggest opportunities in vet medicine? Like when you look at this and you’re thinking about the surgeon general, are there low hanging fruit that, that you feel like practices could do a better job of picking up on that just have not gotten the attention that they should
Dr. Phil Richmond: have?
Yeah. I think, we can take a lot of understanding of what went well and what didn’t go so great from human medicine. And that was that resilience, individual, being apps and being interventions focus solely on the individual.
We’re pushed on, our physician and nursing colleagues, from above, it was like, you need to take these resilience classes or else, and what we found, but they didn’t do anything to decrease job demands. They didn’t do anything to improve resources. They changed software systems and said, continue the same amount of output, even though we’re flipping everything on its head and not accounting for those things. So what we know is that those things are helpful. But I think what we can do is be becoming aware of what are called psychosocial factors, psychosocial hazards, these things in the workplace that we know negatively impact workers mental health. We may not even have them on their radar. So I like to say, so when we were going in, we’re taking x rays on a patient. What’s the first thing that we do to our bodies when we’re getting ready to take x rays?
Dr. Andy Roark: We put our lead aprons on.
Dr. Phil Richmond: exactly. Why? And why?
Dr. Andy Roark: So physical safety.
Dr. Phil Richmond: Cause we know that machine puts out ionizing radiation and it’s damaging to our body. What about things that happen, in the workplace that, that negatively affect our mental health? Like sometimes, potentially euthanasia is traumatic. Traumatic situations, conflict, between owners and, our staff interpersonal relationships.
Again, we mentioned change management, poor change management, things like that. What are the things that we do as leaders or what are the things that we do as organizations that we need to be more aware of that negatively impact our workers mental health and not just say, not, put, all the blame on the, individual.
But that knee jerk response is a good leader in saying, what part are we playing, in this situation, if our team’s not doing well. And so I think awareness as, happens, awareness of these things, awareness of these psychosocial factors is one of the, one of the big things I think that we can do in veterinary medicine.
Dr. Andy Roark: I think, we all believe inherently that if you have good leadership, your job is going to be less stressful. And as you’re saying this, I go, okay. I believe that if I have strong hospital leadership, I’ve got well trained people I’ve got skilled leaders above me, then I am less likely to end up in the situation where I have got this truly irate client who’s being abusive to me and things like, those things just don’t tend to happen.
And it’s, but it’s interesting in my mind, right? Most of those things are handled. It’s this, using the force Jedi approach where it’s, there’s, it’s often subtlety, you build a certain culture. You train people to be able to intervene. you make adjustments when you have problems, which means you have systems to get people where they need to go and oftentimes.
You have to, go through the nasty experience before you go, okay, what are we going to do next time? So that doesn’t happen and you just can’t anticipate everything that can go wrong. But, you can respond to what happened and say, how do we prevent this from happening again? But the point I think for me is when I think about these things filled, they’re all really subtle.
There’s not, when we go, when we put on the lead apron, that’s a. Big, obvious thing. And, AAHA or OSHA can come and they can count the number of aprons that we have, and they can say to the staff, do you put this on your body? Yes or no. How often, but it’s really hard to say, do support your staff in these potentially emotionally damaging ways?
We, all have to do euthanasias that are sad. That are upsetting, But we have seen euthanasias go horribly off the rails and you’re like that never should have happened and that should never that expectation never should have been set I don’t know how you quantify those things.
I don’t know how you say yes we have not had problems because these things were handled appropriately versus We didn’t have these problems because they didn’t happen to us I again does that make sense about like the difference in something physical that you can see and do versus, Hey, we subtly diffuse this or we reduce the stressfulness from a nine to a six.
And that’s again, a stressfulness of a six is not nothing, but it’s something that is manageable for most people again and again, as opposed to the nine that really grinds people down. And so anyway, when you can’t quantify this, Phil, when, we’re really talking about releasing these pressure valves without drawing a ton of attention to it and without, getting a trophy for, making it happen, how do we reinforce this, how do we know if we’re in a place that’s doing good
Dr. Phil Richmond: So there in, you, you brought up two, two excellent points. So you threw some numbers out there, a nine to a six is that there are ways that we can quantify those. To some degree, what I’ll say is in Australia, you said OSHA can come in there, hazards on the floor, we don’t have our spill kit or, those types of things we can get ding for it.
In Australia, if you have a, I believe it’s, if you have a workforce of over 30, you are mandated to measure psychosocial risks the same way that you are the physical risks. in the hospitals, you have to account for those things. And so there are different assessment tools those also do need to be followed up by one on ones with your team members.
One of the things that you said too about the euthanasias, and we throw euthanasias out there and I’m not saying that’s always it’s always something to be concerned about. However, what we need to know is what is the frequency, what is the, like seizures, like what’s the frequency, what’s the duration, and what’s the intent, the intensity of the exposure of our team to these psychosocial factors.
If I, if we’re short staffed one day and we really have to bust butt, that’s not, that doesn’t mean that we’re going to smoke the team.
If we over and over are consistently short staffed and, everything has to come in and we have to see everything that is, then we’re increasing those, that those unachievable job demands, we’re asking more of our team.
Then we, then we should, and we can measure those. And that’s the thing is what, what gets measured gets managed. And we don’t look at these things, just like we’re looking at our patients and taking, taking biochemical profiles and CBCs. We can monitor where we’re at, but if we’re not doing those things with our teams, what we find is that leadership gap between employee team member experience and how well leaders think they’re handling
those psychosocial factors in the workplace, risk, reward and recognition, poor change management, unachievable job demands, job autonomy, those, types of buzzwords that we hear, there’s almost always a gap in how well I think I’m doing as a leader and how well my team thinks or the intensity of which my team is experiencing those. And it’s eyeopening because we’re just as human beings. We under underestimate the bad and overestimate the good sometimes. So it gives us a, it gives us a way to see where we’re at to as leaders. Go ahead, Andy.
Dr. Andy Roark: You think we underestimate the bad and overestimate?
Dr. Phil Richmond: said, sorry as in our performance
Dr. Andy Roark: When we’re thinking about ourselves?
Dr. Phil Richmond: So, so I, as a, cause I was, I tell you what I get much better at football in high school, the older I get.
Dr. Andy Roark: Yes. Yeah,
Dr. Phil Richmond: But just saying though, is that’s, it’s really eyeopening.
And these aren’t poor leaders that I, I’ve seen the data on. These are really conscientious like great culture leaders that there’s still a gap It’s just interesting as all, be and get the sign in my office, be curious, not judgmental.
But it’s just saying, hey, don’t beat yourself up. Let’s see why those gaps are there. And sometimes it is a perception, sometimes the team is perceiving a decreased, what’s interesting is decreased reward and recognition. But when we look at it, what’s interesting is when we do one on ones, oftentimes what I’ll see is that self criticism is so high.
And those individuals, and the team members that the only way that they have to combat that is for you to keep telling me that I’m doing a good job. And I’m not saying that, not saying at all that we shouldn’t do that with our team members, but sometimes we’re, depending on external validation to treat the self criticism.
And so that is where some of the, some of the individual training and resilience training. Like when we talk about growth mindset and self compassion, and some of these interventions that we’ll do in hospitals with veterinary professionals is really impactful.
Dr. Andy Roark: So how do you collect this information? So jumping back to our physical safety metaphor, right? if I walked around every day and I was like, hey, Do you feel safe today? Hey, I noticed that you stumbled earlier. Do you feel, do you, are you sure you’re okay? I like, if you ask people that every day, I think they’d be like, what?
I, wonder, I, so anyway, I’ve seen presentations where people have literally made the recommendation. We’ve got this, we’ve got this mechanism and when people clock in, we ask them how they’re feeling. And then if they do a euthanasia, the practice management software lets us know and we’ll reach out to them and say, Hey, you did a euthanasia today.
Are you feeling okay? And, I’m like, man, if that messaging continuously flowed in on you of, Oh boy, you had a hard day today. Are you doing okay? Are you doing okay? I could see that actually being detrimental because it’s continued to me. There’s this worry of highlighting and overemphasizing the, challenging parts of our day.
And again, I know I get pushed back on this and people know me well enough to know that I’m not a monster and I want people to, I want people to be taken care of. What, how do we go about gauging our people and how we’re doing without it feeling there like they’re continuously being probed for pain, injury, weakness, illness, because I think that there’s real downsides to this messaging that if you’re, In that medicine, you’re in danger and you live in danger. I don’t think that’s healthy for us. And, but I still want that information in that, because I do want to be able to, help people who need help and be supportive and make adjustments. And so Phil, how do I thread that needle of of not making my hospital into a sick ward, but still recognizing what’s really going on with my people and making the adjustments to make us, to make a great workplace.
Dr. Phil Richmond: it’s a great point is when we run hospital level assessments, we’re not doing those weekly, or monthly, we’re doing those two, maybe three times a year, like in threes a lot, if it’s just, and. And what I’ll say too is it’s, really more important as a leader that with the check in that it’s something where if I’m going through like a checklist, like it’s more important that team member, I’ll say it in this way, and, data supports this, but that, team member thinks that I have their best interests at heart.
and that when I’m checked, there’s an, and that’s why I really, love that. surgeon general’s framework, focuses on those relationships at work, focuses on, mattering at work, does my leader think that I matter? Because then if that’s the case, if I, if we’ve set that culture and I really am smoked mentally, I can go up to, my leader and feel safe to say, I’m just not off, instead of every time, something happens, that we, the, as a leader, I, I swoop in and say, are you okay? Certainly if something big happens, but let me say this too, is the other thing, and what our data from, from our assessment shows is that the majority of veterinary professionals are either really doing well, like all, they’re, just really, thriving.
Or what we like to call they’re living well, despite struggle,
Dr. Andy Roark: Okay.
Dr. Phil Richmond: They have the tools like, yeah, some days are tough, I got people that I work with that I, that, that care about me, I’ve got some, in, external tool or, some, individual tools to help me with that.
But I also feel like if I really needed to, I could go up to my workplace and go, Hey, I really need tomorrow off, and that there’s no questions asked, but I’m not overdoing it. So that’s, that too, is I want to say that is that, the majority of veterinary professionals, when we’re in our assessment, which is a little bit different than what the Merck study looks at, but is that the resilience of individuals is, comes through in in our data.
Dr. Andy Roark: Yeah. Dude, that, that makes a ton of sense. Tell me a little bit more about the, permatool. So, you set this thing up, just give me at a high level, give, me a, an overview of kind of how this works.
Dr. Phil Richmond: Yeah. So PERMA is an acronym for positive emotion, engagement, relationships meaning and purpose, achievement and accomplishment, and health or physical health. And it’s a framework that was really put forth by Dr. Martin Seligman who’s the father of modern positive psychology, evidence based framework.
And, it’s certainly been proven. changes with time. But if, we have all six of those things working well for us. Usually we’re, what we call flourishing. Like we’re really doing well, but it’s, it’s like the, Seligman talks about those like dials on a, on an airplane is that, we want to use all of them in different, different ways.
We need all of them to get the plane to go, in one direction or, to fly well, but it gives us an idea of that. And we look at that again, when we look at those, Individual assessments of, those, six factors. We look at it on an individual basis. How well am I doing those things?
Individually, how well does my team do that? The people that I work with face to face and then my organization, does my organization allow those things to happen? And that’s one, one section of it. And then we look at some of the nutrients that we know that we need in the workplace belonging. Do I have read the resources I need?
Do I have the autonomy to do what? You know what I want? Do I have the confidence and competence, the education? Have I been given the tools to do that, educationally. And then we also look at those psychosocial factors, the OSHA for our brains, I like to call it is what is the job demand?
what is, when change happens, how well informed am I, or is it just dropped on me with no, no regard for how that’s going to impact my stress levels job autonomy, like we were talking about traumatic events again, job demand, is, another way one.
And then the biggest one, not surprising given AAHA’s what AAHA saw, but also what we see in our study is, reward and recognition. Is how, well, not just financially, but how well am I being being told that I do a good job. And then the last aspect of the assessment is positive leadership, looking at the compassion of our leaders the acceptance of, different things.
The the relationship between. Between myself and my team members. Also, do I take responsibility for things as a leader and what’s my emotional wisdom? do I have the ability, do I have the high degree of emotional intelligence as a leader? And those factors, when all those factors are taken into consideration, it really gives us a really good idea of kind of the, health of the practice and culture.
Dr. Andy Roark: Yeah, that, totally makes sense. Phil, I appreciate you coming on and talking to me. Where can people find you online? Where can they learn more if they want to reach out about the perma tool? Where, can they get you?
Dr. Phil Richmond: yeah. At flourishing phoenix.com or flo fo.vet flourishing phoenix.com is great. Also we’re doing a lot of work with the FVMA. We just launched our Inspire by FVMA program. It’s a comprehensive one of its kind wellbeing program for for state VMAs. A number of pillars, but really works on that red Cape green cape.
the, lifting people up when they’re struggling access to veterinary informed mental health professionals. And then we’ve got a, we’re training a cohort of veterinary professionals in these, very things on workplace wellbeing, creating a team that’s going to give, tools for interventions to improve veterinary workplaces in the state of Florida.
Dr. Andy Roark: Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. I’ll put links in the show note to to everything you mentioned guys, thanks for being here. Take care of yourselves, everybody. We’ll talk to you later.
Dr. Phil Richmond: Thanks everybody.
Dr. Andy Roark: And that’s what I got guys. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you got something out of it. As I always enjoy these conversations, Phil is such a wealth of information. He’s a good friend of mine. I really enjoy talking to him. He’s just got such a great insight on the profession overall. But I just, I always take things away from our conversations.
I hope you guys are doing great. Take care of yourselves, everybody. I’ll talk to you later.
