Meta title: How Much Time Do Vets Spend on Clinical Notes? Meta description: Australian vets spend 3+ hours a day writing clinical notes. See the real numbers on vet admin time, why it leads to burnout, and how to reclaim those hours. Target keywords: vet admin time, vet burnout admin Pillar: 1 — Clinical Note Formats & Templates Funnel stage: Top Internal links: /ai-vet-scribe, /blog/veterinary-soap-notes-guide, /blog/ai-veterinary-scribe-pricing-compared, /blog/ai-for-veterinarians-guide

You didn't go through five years of vet school to spend your evenings typing up clinical notes.

But that's the reality for most vets. Between consults, you're scribbling shorthand. After hours, you're filling in the gaps. On your day off, you're catching up on records you didn't finish. And the guilt of incomplete notes follows you home.

Let's put some real numbers on the problem — because once you see how much time clinical notes actually take, you'll understand why so many vets are burning out.

The maths on vet admin time

Here's a conservative estimate for a typical small animal vet:

Ten minutes per consult is the average most vets report. Some consults take five minutes to document, others take fifteen — especially surgeries, dental procedures, or complicated medical cases. Ten minutes is a reasonable middle ground.

At 20 consults a day, that's 3 hours and 20 minutes spent purely on documentation. Every single day.

Over a month, that's roughly 66 hours — more than a full working week and a half spent writing notes instead of seeing patients, talking to clients, or going home on time.

Even if you're faster — say, 7 minutes per consult — you're still losing over 2 hours a day and 46 hours a month.

Where does the time actually go?

It's rarely one big block of writing. The admin creeps in everywhere:

• During consults — jotting shorthand notes while trying to listen to the client and examine the patient
• Between consults — rushing to type something up before the next patient walks in
• At lunch — catching up on the morning's records instead of eating
• After hours — sitting at the computer finishing notes when everyone else has gone home
• At home — logging in remotely to complete records you couldn't get to during the day

Sound familiar? You're not alone. As one vet put it: "Note taking has always been one of my lowest priorities... details can be easily forgotten."

The fragmented nature of clinical documentation makes it worse than the raw numbers suggest. You're not just spending 3 hours writing — you're context-switching dozens of times a day between clinical work and admin, which is mentally exhausting.

The real cost isn't just time

Burnout

The link between admin burden and vet burnout is well documented. A 2024 Australian study found that inadequate staffing combined with heavy workloads drives significantly higher burnout scores among small animal GPs. Almost two-thirds of Australian vets have considered leaving their principal area of practice in the past year, with a third wanting to leave the profession entirely.

In human medicine, documentation is now ranked as the number one driver of physician burnout — surpassing difficult patients and bureaucratic red tape. Physicians spend nearly 2 hours on documentation for every 1 hour of direct patient care, plus 1-2 hours of after-hours charting each night. Vets face the same burden without the same support infrastructure.

The emotional toll goes beyond feeling tired. It's the guilt of knowing your notes aren't as thorough as they should be. It's choosing between staying late to finish records or being home for dinner. It's the slow erosion of why you got into vet medicine in the first place.

Incomplete records

When notes are a burden, they don't get done properly. Details get missed. Medication doses aren't recorded accurately. Follow-up plans are vague. The consult you remember clearly at 10am becomes a blur by 5pm.

This creates real problems:

• Clinical risk — incomplete records mean the next vet seeing that patient doesn't have the full picture
• Legal exposure — if there's ever a complaint, your notes are your primary defence
• Lost revenue — billable items that aren't documented don't get charged. Across 400 consults a month, even small gaps add up

The domino effect on your practice

For practice owners and managers, the admin burden has a multiplier effect. Vets running behind on notes run behind on consults. Late-running consults frustrate clients. Frustrated clients don't come back. Meanwhile, your best vets are burning out and looking for locum work or leaving the profession.

"There was always a delay in veterinarian completion of notes," one practice manager told us. It's a pattern every practice knows.

What about typing faster? Templates? Shortcuts?

Most vets have tried to optimise their way out of this. PMS templates, copy-paste shortcuts, voice-to-text dictation, abbreviations. These help at the margins, but they don't solve the fundamental problem: you're still the one doing the documentation.

Templates speed up the format but not the content. Dictation tools like Dragon or Talkatoo transcribe your words, but you still need to speak the entire note — which takes nearly as long as typing it. Copy-paste creates inconsistent, sometimes inaccurate records.

The bottleneck isn't how fast you type. It's that you're doing it at all.

What if the notes wrote themselves?

This is where AI vet scribes come in — and specifically, why they're different from dictation tools.

An AI vet scribe doesn't need you to dictate a structured note. You just have your normal conversation with the client, examine the patient, discuss the plan — and the AI listens, understands the clinical context, and generates the documentation for you.

Here's what changes:

That's roughly 25 hours per month reclaimed per vet. Time that goes back to seeing patients, talking to clients, or simply going home when the day ends.

"Whippet Notes has helped me save a lot of admin time by writing detailed medical notes for me," says Dr David Clifford of Rathmines Veterinary Hospital.

The key is that the notes aren't just transcriptions — they're structured clinical records. A good AI scribe generates proper SOAP notes with subjective, objective, assessment, and plan sections filled in correctly. It catches medication names and dosages. It produces patient summaries, client letters, and billable items — all from a single recording.

"Whippet Notes allows me to focus on my patient and client, knowing the details of our conversation are locked away," says Dr Alana Dowdell of Pets And Their People.

Is it worth the cost?

Quick maths: if a vet's time is worth $80-120/hour (a conservative estimate when you factor in consult revenue), then 25 hours saved per month is $2,000-3,000 in recovered capacity — per vet, per month.

An AI vet scribe like Whippet Notes starts at $80/month for individual vets. Practice plans cover multiple vets for $349/month. You can compare pricing across AI vet scribes to see how different options stack up.

The ROI isn't theoretical. It's the vet who goes home at 5:30 instead of 7. The practice that fits in two extra consults per day because notes aren't creating a backlog. The new grad who doesn't burn out in their first year.

Getting started

If you want to see what 25 hours back looks like:

1. Try it free — Whippet Notes includes 10 free consults per month, forever. No credit card needed.
2. Use it for a week — record your normal consults and see the notes it generates
3. Compare — check your notes against what you'd normally write. Most vets find the AI output is actually more thorough than their manual notes.

"This app is revolutionising my life, so easy to use to capture details," says Dr Alison McKendrick of Glencoe Veterinary Services.

You became a vet to help animals — not to spend a quarter of your working life typing. It's time to get those hours back.