Emma Barnes is Managing Director for Veterinary at Agilio Software. Before joining Agilio, she spent four years as Chief Operating Officer at Linnaeus, where she helped grow the group to 165 practices and over 3,000 staff. She’s a certified business coach and has spent her career helping veterinary organisations build the operational foundations that allow them to scale without losing quality – and team development sits at the centre of that.
Ask most veterinary professionals what CPD looks like and they will describe a clinical course. Anaesthesia updates, diagnostic imaging workshops, emergency and critical care training. All of it valuable, all of it necessary. But in my experience scaling veterinary groups, the CPD that most often gets neglected – and that tends to have the biggest impact on how a practice actually functions – is the non-clinical kind.
Communication skills. People management. HR fundamentals. Mental health awareness. Handling a complaint from a distressed pet owner. Explaining a treatment plan to someone who came in expecting a routine consultation. These are not peripheral topics. They are the situations that define how a practice is experienced by its clients and how its team holds together under pressure.
And here is the part that often surprises people: non-clinical learning is fully recognised by the RCVS as qualifying veterinary continuing education, counting towards mandatory CPD hours for both veterinary surgeons and registered veterinary nurses. But the case for it extends well beyond those who have a formal CPD requirement – because the people carrying the heaviest non-clinical load in most practices are often the ones with no requirement at all.
What non-clinical CPD covers
Non-clinical CPD is any learning that develops how a veterinary professional works, communicates, and leads – rather than what they do clinically. The RCVS outcomes-based framework explicitly recognises that professional development spans far beyond clinical knowledge and does not prescribe a minimum number of clinical hours.
In practice, non-clinical veterinary continuing education covers a wide range of topics:
- Communication skills – client consultations, difficult conversations, delivering bad news
- Pricing transparency and handling cost conversations with clients
- Complaints handling and de-escalation
- People management and leadership
- HR and employment law fundamentals
- Health and safety in the practice environment
- Equality, diversity, and inclusion
- Mental health awareness and staff wellbeing
- Business skills and financial literacy for practice managers
For vets and registered veterinary nurses, all of these count towards mandatory RCVS CPD hours, provided the learning is reflected on and recorded in the 1CPD platform. For practice managers, receptionists, and support staff, who have no formal RCVS requirement, the case for this training rests on something more straightforward: these are the skills their roles demand every single day, and most of them have never been formally trained in any of them.
The clinical team: why non-clinical skills matter as much as clinical ones
The gap between clinical competence and practice performance
A practice full of clinically excellent vets can still underperform. It can have high staff turnover, poor client retention, complaints that escalate unnecessarily, and a team that burns out faster than it can be replaced. Clinical skill is necessary – it is not sufficient.
During my time at Linnaeus, the practices with the strongest cultures and the most stable teams were not the ones with the most specialist clinical expertise. They were the ones where managers knew how to lead, where communication was clear and consistent, and where staff felt supported. Those qualities are not accidental. They are the product of deliberate investment in non-clinical development.
Communication is a clinical skill in practice
Client-facing communication directly affects outcomes. A vet who can explain a diagnosis and treatment plan clearly, handle a concerned owner with empathy, and manage expectations around cost and prognosis is not just providing better service – they are reducing the risk of complaints, building client trust, and improving treatment compliance. These are learnable skills. They do not develop reliably without training.
The same applies internally. Clear communication within a practice team reduces errors, improves handover quality, and creates an environment where people feel heard. None of this happens automatically.
Receptionists and practice administrators: the most under-supported people in the practice
Receptionists and practice administrators have no formal CPD requirement. They are not registered with the RCVS. And yet in most veterinary practices, they are the first point of contact for every client who walks through the door or picks up the phone. They handle appointment booking, triage calls from worried owners, explain treatment costs, manage complaints in real time, and hold the front-of-house together during the busiest and most stressful periods of the day.
The emotional and professional demands of that role are significant. And the formal development support provided for people in it is, in most practices, minimal to none.
Consider the specific situations a receptionist routinely faces without any formal training to draw on:
Pricing and cost conversations. Veterinary care is expensive, and clients do not always understand why. A receptionist who has never been trained in how to explain costs clearly, handle shock or frustration calmly, and communicate value without being defensive is in an impossible position. These conversations, handled badly, generate complaints. Handled well, they build loyalty.
Complaint handling and de-escalation. Distressed, angry, or grieving pet owners do not always direct their feelings at the vet. Receptionists absorb a significant proportion of client dissatisfaction, often without any framework for how to respond. Training in de-escalation, empathy, and when to escalate does not just protect the client relationship – it protects the wellbeing of the person on the receiving end.
Mental health and emotional resilience. The veterinary environment is emotionally demanding for everyone in it, and receptionists are no exception. They witness difficult clinical outcomes, manage distressed clients, and often feel caught between client expectations and clinical capacity. Mental health awareness training and tools for managing emotional load have direct relevance to this role.
The case for this does not rest on regulation. It requires a practice that recognises the complexity of what its front-of-house team is being asked to do and decides to give them the tools to do it well.
The confidence gap: what practice managers are really responsible for
Most practice managers would say they trust their receptionists. What they are less certain about is whether their receptionists have ever been given the tools to handle the situations they face every day.
There is a difference between trusting someone’s instincts and being confident they are equipped. A receptionist who is naturally empathetic will handle a distressed client better than one who is not – but empathy alone does not give someone a framework for a complaint that is escalating, a pricing conversation that has gone wrong, or a client who is asking questions the receptionist does not know how to answer without overstepping.
When a client calls to dispute an invoice, who takes that call? When a grieving owner arrives at the front desk angry and looking for someone to blame, who absorbs that? When a new starter is unsure whether to put a call through to the vet or handle it themselves, what do they draw on?
In most practices, the honest answer is: instinct, experience, and whatever they have picked up by watching colleagues. That is not a training programme. It is hope.
Non-clinical CPD changes this. When the whole team – vets, nurses, receptionists, and support staff – has completed the same foundational training in communication, complaints handling, and client care, something shifts in the practice culture.
Everyone is working from the same playbook. The receptionist knows how to handle the difficult call because they have been trained to, not because they happened to have good instincts. The practice manager can have genuine confidence in how their team represents the practice at every touchpoint, not just the clinical ones.
That consistency is what good practice culture actually looks like in practice. Not a values statement on the wall – a team that handles the hard moments well, together, because they have been prepared to.
Practice managers: leaders without a development pathway
Practice managers occupy one of the most operationally demanding roles in veterinary healthcare. They are responsible for HR, finance, compliance, team culture, client experience, and often the day-to-day clinical scheduling – frequently without having had any formal management training, and without a CPD framework that specifically supports their development.
Many practice managers come from clinical backgrounds. They were excellent nurses or experienced receptionists who were promoted into management because they were good at their previous role. That is a reasonable way to identify potential. It is not a substitute for management development.
The skills required to manage a veterinary practice team well – understanding employment law, having difficult performance conversations, supporting a team member through a mental health challenge, managing conflict, building a culture where people want to stay – are learnable. But they need to be taught. A practice manager who has never had formal input on HR fundamentals is not failing through lack of effort. They are working without the tools the role requires.
Non-clinical CPD for practice managers is an investment with a direct return. Better-managed teams have lower turnover. Lower turnover reduces recruitment costs and preserves institutional knowledge. And practice managers who feel developed and supported are more likely to stay themselves.
Non-clinical CPD for veterinary nurses
Registered veterinary nurses are increasingly being asked to take on client-facing, leadership, and mentoring responsibilities – often without the non-clinical training that those responsibilities require. Their 15-hour annual CPD requirement creates space for this development, but the pressure to prioritise clinical nursing skills is understandable and real.
The most effective veterinary training programmes for RVNs balance both. Non-clinical training in communication, team leadership, mental health awareness, and equality and diversity supports the expanded role vet nurses are taking on in practice – and makes them stronger candidates for senior and specialist positions.
Making non-clinical CPD work across the whole practice
The most effective approach to non-clinical veterinary CPD and continuing education is to build it into the practice’s operating rhythm at every level – not to leave it to individuals and not to limit it to those with a regulatory requirement.
Give the whole team access to the same foundational training. Topics such as health and safety, equality and diversity, mental health awareness, and complaints handling benefit from being completed across all roles. A shared baseline creates a shared standard, and it signals that development is a whole-practice priority, not just a clinical one.
Use non-clinical CPD to develop future leaders. Practices that identify senior nurses, experienced receptionists, or clinical leads with management potential and invest deliberately in their leadership and people management development build a reliable internal pipeline. Promoting from within is more effective than recruiting externally but only if the prior investment in development has been made.
Schedule it rather than hoping it happens. Online CPD can be completed flexibly, but it will not get done without protected time. Building a monthly or quarterly learning rhythm – even 30 minutes of structured online training – makes non-clinical development a habit rather than an afterthought.
Connect learning to real situations. The most effective non-clinical training is applied, not abstract. Discussing what the team has learned in the context of real situations – a difficult client interaction, a complaint, a team conflict, makes reflection meaningful and behaviour change more likely.
How iLearn supports non-clinical CPD across every role
iLearn by Agilio Software was built to make non-clinical veterinary CPD accessible for the whole practice team – not just clinical staff. The platform offers more than 100 courses covering communication, HR, health and safety, complaints handling, mental health awareness, equality and diversity, and leadership, all mapped to RCVS CPD requirements for vets and nurses, and equally relevant for practice managers, receptionists, and support staff.
Practices can assign courses to individuals or the whole team, track completion centrally, and access CPD certificates for every team member. The platform offers a limited number of free veterinary CPD courses, giving practices a straightforward starting point for building a non-clinical training programme across all roles.
For the full picture on RCVS CPD requirements – hours, what counts, and how to record – visit our vet CPD requirements guide
