EASVO joins the celebration of World Mental Health Day. On October 10th, FVE, FECAVA and IVSA present the second year of our mental wellbeing platform www.vetjoy.org, featuring a jointly developed comprehensive toolkit, to champion mental well-being across the veterinary profession. VetJoy.org addresses these challenges head-on, with resources tailored holistically all along the career path to support mental well-being, DEI, and resilience-building for veterinary professionals. Thanks to the generous funding from Zoetis and its Foundation, the toolkit offers a broad range of enhanced resources, including workplace coaching vouchers, a mentoring programme, podcasts, videos, articles and much more. This year’s initiatives included:
• The Great Veterinary Workplaces Award, celebrating veterinary workplaces excelling in well-being, leadership, and work-life balance. The 2025 winners are Vita-Vet (North Macedonia) in the small/medium non-clinical workplace category, Hall Mark Veterinary and Compliance Services (United Kingdom) in the large non-clinical workplace category, Clinica Veterinaria Giaconella (Italy) in the small/medium clinical workplace category and Tierarztpraxis am Stadtpark (Austria) in the large clinical workplace category.
• The VetJoy DEI research grant aims to support European veterinary medicine students’ research proposals on DEI in the veterinary profession. The grant went to Virginia Conforti with her research project The Holy Paradox, exploring the position of female veterinarians working at abattoirs, specifically in religious abattoirs for kosher and halal products.
• The VetJoy Team Coaching Voucher programme aims to support veterinary teams to improve their mental wellbeing thanks to 79 vetted coaches. In 2025, 23 clinical and 6 non-clinical workplaces across nine European countries were supported so far. The VetJoy vouchers are extremely popular, all vouchers were already allocated by September.
Enthusiastic about the Vetjoy project, the Austrian Association of Official Veterinarians took the opportunity to offer its members two communication workshops in November with the title: “Thick air – bomb defusal through harmonious conversation” for its members. Mag. Andrea Leutgöb-Ozlberger, President of the ÖVA, is pleased that a low-threshold offer could be created by financing the workshop via a coaching voucher.
“Understanding the basics of communication is helpful in order to be able to better define oneself. A change of perspective makes it possible to no longer take some things personally that are important for one’s own self-esteem, inner peace and also for successful demarcation,” says the speaker of the workshop, Dr. Katharina Wanha, explaining the benefits of the workshop. After 10 years of veterinary work, she changed roles and now works as a psychosocial counsellor and supervisor.
“The communication workshop was an enrichment for the participants. The basics of communication and the change of perspective as key contents of the workshop were well received, the exercises were eye-opening and fun. Questions could be asked, which could also be answered to satisfaction. Now customer conversations are conducted more thoughtfully and consciously; Counter-arguments are weighed more consciously. At the end of the day, we are more relaxed because we try to leave problems where they happen and have realized that it is not the person who is the problem, but the situation,” says Andrea Leutgöb-Ozlberger, pleased with the good result of the communication workshop.
