AAHA’s From the SOAP Box podcast published “Dr. Kate Boatright on mentorship in veterinary medicine” on July 3, 2025. The public episode page links to Spotify, YouTube, and AAHA’s learning management system, but does not include a transcript. For practical detail, Boatright’s separate 2023 interview describes how clinics can structure mentorship; those recommendations should not be mistaken for a transcript of the 2025 episode.
Where to find the AAHA episode
The episode is part of AAHA’s From the SOAP Box series. AAHA lists Spotify, YouTube, and its learning management system as listening options on the official episode page. The page identifies Boatright as a small-animal veterinarian, speaker, and author in western Pennsylvania. She graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2013 and has worked in rural small-animal general practice and emergency clinics.
AAHA’s public page does not provide the episode transcript. The specific mentorship advice below comes from Boatright’s separate conversation on The Whole Veterinarian, published July 27, 2023, rather than from a verified transcript of the 2025 AAHA episode.
What Boatright says makes mentorship work
In the 2023 interview, Boatright describes mentorship as a planned working relationship, not simply an invitation to ask questions when someone gets stuck. She recommends agreeing on expectations among the mentor, mentee, and clinic management, and documenting the mentorship period, responsibilities, and how the mentee’s work will progress.
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Start with supported clinical work
Boatright’s suggested progression begins with working alongside or shadowing a colleague. The mentee can then take on preventive visits and sick appointments with support, with appointment lengths and independence adjusted to the person’s confidence and the clinic’s setup. The aim is to expand responsibility deliberately rather than assume a new veterinarian is ready to manage every case alone from the outset.
Protect time for feedback and case review
Mentorship needs room in the schedule. Boatright recommends setting aside protected time for feedback and case review rather than relying on whatever minutes happen to remain between appointments. As she put it: “I think it’s really important when the other part of setting the schedule is setting some set feedback times and time for case review, that is really protected in the clinic schedule.”
Make the commitment long enough to develop
For the formal mentorship period, Boatright recommends at least six months and ideally 12 months. She also recognizes that mentoring continues after a formal period ends; the suggested timeline is her recommendation in that interview, not a universal professional standard.
What a clinic can agree on before starting
Boatright’s interview points to a few practical decisions that help a practice turn a general promise of support into a workable plan:
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- Who is responsible: clarify what the mentor, mentee, and management each contribute.
- How work will progress: identify the initial supported tasks and how the mentee may take on more responsibility.
- How support is delivered: decide whether help is available in person, remotely, or through a mix of approaches that fits the clinic.
- When review happens: schedule feedback and case-review time in advance and protect it.
- How long the formal plan lasts: set a defined period while recognizing that the mentoring relationship may continue beyond it.
These choices should reflect the clinic’s capacity and the veterinarian’s needs; the interview does not prescribe one fixed mentorship model for every practice.
Why Boatright developed a mentorship manual
Boatright recounts that her first practice provided strong support from veterinarians and technicians. A later practice offered less support, which affected her confidence and communication. She found mentors again while working in emergency medicine and later became a primary mentor herself. In the 2023 interview, she says that her experience mentoring others led her to create a manual to help practices build programs and give mentors support as well as new graduates.
Her current storefront describes the Veterinary Mentorship Manual: Small Animal Edition as a downloadable PDF workbook for clinics setting up a mentorship program. It also lists digital resources such as a sample mentoring schedule and mentor meeting agenda. The available information identifies the manual as a digital workbook, not a verified physical Amazon edition. See the author’s storefront.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Additional mentorship resources
For practices or early-career veterinarians looking beyond the interview, Boatright’s mentorship page identifies MentorVet as an option offering group and one-to-one mentoring opportunities. AAHA also provides a mentoring toolkit. These are separate resources, not components of the AAHA podcast episode.
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