The Mayne Veterinary Clinic, UK

Organisational background

The Mayne Veterinary Clinic is a small independent veterinary practice based in Colchester. There has been a veterinary clinic on this site since 1975 and we have been looking after generations of local pets for many years.

Charlotte first joined the clinic in 2004 and, together with her husband Keith, bought the practice in 2012.

Over the last 10 years, we have grown and developed a fantastic team providing an amazing level of service to both pets and clients (feel free to check our reviews on our website!).

We value our independence and enjoy building a clinic that so many clients have said is the best veterinary clinic they have ever been to.

Organisation aims & mission

When asked to summarise our organisations aims and missions the team decided this best reflected their goals: “We are proud to be a successful, warm and welcoming team providing a friendly, professional, and safe environment. This creates a positive atmosphere open to learning and development which gives us the skills and knowledge to provide our clients with a service they can trust and rely on.”

The key word we focus our organisational values on is sustainability:

Sustainability of our Team

Our goal is to be working with the same team in 5 years’ time that we are today. We feel there are several key aspects to that:

• We aim to provide a work-life balance that is tailored to each individual. A big part of that is accepting (and encouraging the team to accept) that those needs may change over time. We have a degree of flexibility in our rota and are more interested in finding the right person and will tweak the rota.
• We ensure the team is working in a practice they are proud of by including them in deciding and implementing how the practice functions, what services we provide, and the manner in which we provide them. Many of the ideas for the great services we now offer have been generated through team-led meetings and then put into action by the team themselves.
• We actively promote wellness within the team and dedicate clinic time to discussing wellness topics. Most recently these have included how different team members have used “life wheels”, inviting a physiotherapy specialist into the clinic to help advise how we can best take care of ourselves physically while on the job, and regular social events that have ranged from mug making, through a visit to Go-Ape and a beach BBQ. We also have a wellness area where team members can take themselves off for a break and enjoy the warm weather we get down here.

Sustainability in our Clients

We pride ourselves on providing top-quality care to our clients and their pets. Our goal is to provide real long-term improvement to the quality of life of our patients and we achieve this through:

• Our Pet Health Club which provides unlimited veterinary and nurse consults, so unwell patients tend to be brought in earlier in the disease process and clients never worry about the costs of coming back for a recheck.
• We run multiple nurse clinic bundles to improve the health of our patients from obesity clinics and confidence clinics to help fix those lockdown puppies to our 3-visit post-op dental packages help to better educate clients on long-term dental care.
• We have also still kept our books CLOSED to pets already registered in the area as we are more concerned about providing a good service to the patients and clients we already have rather than increasing the numbers and putting added pressure on the team.

Sustainability in the Environment

We are a team that genuinely cares about our impact on the environment. We strongly believe it is the responsibility of all businesses to minimise their impact on the environment and feel that financially investing in the environment should be a core part of any business plan.

• Through accreditation with Investors in the Environment, we have been working on reducing our carbon footprint since 2018 and are currently working towards our Green award with them.
• While actively working to reduce our impact, we have also collaborated with Eco Offset to offset, not only the carbon footprint of the clinic but also the footprint of each team member and every pet in our Pet Health Club, becoming one of the first clinics in the UK to offset more carbon than they are actually using.
• We were recently runners up in Vet Webinar Vet’s national Veterinary Green Awards.

Up until now, most of our recruitment has been via recommendations from current team members. As a result, our team resembles a group of friends that happen to work together rather than colleagues in a veterinary clinic.

We share a lot of mutual respect and have similar goals and values which provides fantastic team harmony, but also are happy to have a laugh and a giggle when the time is right.

Being a small, adaptable independent clinic, we truly are team-led and can quickly introduce new ideas or developments to the clinic as the team sees fit. Giving the team more control over the clinic development as well as a budget to spend on what they like, they have developed a clinic they truly believe in and are proud to work for.

“It’s never boring, every day is different, and the clients are lovely. “Julie Sturgeon, Client Care Team.

We’re not interested in the worlds greatest vet, or the world’s hardest worker. Our perfect vet is one that is looking for a friendly team environment and respects the position and value of every member within the practice. We have found it far easier to develop the veterinary skills of a good person than it is to develop the “people” skills of a grade A surgeon.

We are happy to adapt the position to the right candidate with regards to hours and salary as the person is more important to us than the job role. We would prefer someone with at least 2 years of experience, as we have a recent grad on board already (we recruited our favorite EMS student), but that level of experience is not essential and you will be working with a vet team with over 50 years of collective experience so there will always be someone to have a quick look at that set of x-rays you’re looking at and we now have 5, soon to be 6 RVNs on board.