HR for mixed and farm practices

Two practices in one rota. HR that keeps both standing.

Name: Vet HR
Address: 71-75 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London, WC2H 9JQ, GB
Telephone: 0800 023 5232

A mixed practice runs a small animal clinic and a farm round at the same time, with the same people. Vet HR provides HR for mixed animal practices: rotas that hold both sides of the business, lone working done properly and hours captured wherever the day goes.

Book a free HR health check → See the staff systems

Farm round and clinic in one rota TB testing days planned Wide-area on call shared

Cattle in a field on a farm round, part of the working week in HR for mixed animal practices

Lone working check-ins

Hours captured on the road

01What makes it different

The farm side and the clinic side pull on the same people. The rota decides whether that works or burns them out.

Mixed practice is the hardest scheduling problem in the profession: consult blocks that need bodies in the building, a farm round that takes vets out for whole days, TB testing that blocks out diaries weeks ahead, and on call that covers serious distance.

When that is managed informally, the flexible people absorb the load until they leave. We make the pattern visible, the sharing fair and the records solid, and we write the policies that farm work genuinely needs.

02The pressures

Where HR for mixed animal practices earns its keep.

Three pressures we see again and again, and what fixing them properly looks like.

One team, two competing diaries

Every vet on the farm round is a vet not in the consult room. Without one rota that shows both sides, the clinic quietly runs short and the same names get pulled out to cover, week after week.

TB testing and the planning horizon

Testing days are booked far ahead and are immovable. They need to sit in the rota as fixed points that holiday, on call and clinic cover plan around, not as surprises that surface in the Monday scramble.

Lone working across a big patch

A vet alone in a crush pen or on a remote holding faces real physical risk. That needs a written lone working policy, a check-in routine and an incident record, so near misses become information rather than pub stories.

03The systems

White-labelled systems, mapped to your kind of practice.

Every system carries your practice's name and branding, not ours. These are the ones that matter most here.

Need something custom? →

Rota system: Farm round, clinic blocks, TB testing days and on call in one view, with gaps flagged early and the load visibly shared.
Clock in and out: Hours captured from a phone anywhere on the patch. Real days, recorded, payroll-ready.
See It Report It: Handling incidents, near misses and vehicle issues logged in a structured, time-stamped record.
Policy library: Lone working, driving, on call and biosecurity-adjacent HR policies written for farm work, acknowledged and versioned.

04Questions

Asked by practices like yours.

Can one rota really hold farm, clinic and on call at once?

Yes. That is the core design case. Fixed points like TB testing days go in first, clinic blocks and the farm round plan around them, and on call sits over the top with fairness visible.

Our on call area is huge. How does HR help with that?

By making the pattern explicit: who covers which area, how first and second on call work, how recovery time is handled, and what the contract actually promises. Ambiguity is what makes wide-area on call corrosive.

Do you understand farm work or just small animal?

Vet HR works exclusively with UK veterinary practices, including mixed and farm. The policies and rota patterns we build reflect crush pens, holdings and driving distance, not office corridors.

Where do we start?

The free 30-minute HR health check. We look at contracts, rota and policies against how a mixed practice actually runs, then quote in writing for anything worth fixing.

Book a free HR health check → Or call 0800 023 5232