about us
The WellVetMind Mission
Our mission is simple: keep good vets in the job they trained for and improve their professional quality of life, by giving them somewhere to put what the job does to them.
We help achieve this by encouraging practices to provide counselling as part of every vet’s employee benefits. Let’s face it, generic EAP counselling wasn’t built for this job. It’s a phone number attached to a script, staffed by people with good intentions but no frame of reference for what a vet actually does – the clinical decision-making under time pressure, the moral weight of “what would you do if it was your own animal”, the fact that money is often the deciding factor in an animal’s fate.
Who’s Behind WellVetMind?
I’m Christian Bamber. I qualified as a veterinary surgeon in 2000, and spent 26 years in practice alongside training as a counsellor and psychotherapist. I’m a member of the BACP and accredited member of the NCPS, and I also hold an MBA and a Master’s in neuroscience from Cambridge which means I can talk both languages: the clinical reality of practice life and the toll it can take on us.
I still work part-time as a vet and that’s deliberate. I’m very much amongst it and trying to change things from within. I’m also a counsellor for the fantastic Devon Mind mental health charity and run a private counselling and psychotherapy practice in Devon.
“Our lives are inextrciably linked to the job we do and the ones we do it for. We cannot serve others well while failing ourselves”