Hugo Richardson Email & Phone Number

Described as a sociable, fun (and funny by my wife), energetic and dependable person I get to combine my love of meeting interesting people with my passion for improving the welfare of my fellow veterinary professionals. I enjoy the benefits and flexibility of running my own company which helps with looking after my young family while also travelling regularly across the Nordic countries fulfilling my love of adventure.Working as a veterinary surgeon for the last 15 years in many different clinics around the UK and abroad, I have experienced first-hand the highs and lows of being in this profession. I noticed that parts of the veterinary industry were broken, with high levels of burn-out, stress and mental health crises amongst my fellow vets. Many of my highly experienced colleagues were becoming disillusioned and either had left or were planning to leave the profession entirely. In 2016 I got the opportunity to work as a vet in Norway and then Sweden the following summer. This experience opened my eyes to a better more sustainable way of working in a beautiful environment where I was more connected to nature and the outdoors, which vastly improved my own mental health and I was happier and more fulfilled professionally. I realised then that ingrained within the culture of the Nordic countries is a fundamental appreciation of the importance of a strict eight hour working day, finishing on time, taking appropriate breaks and making allowance for family time, which all leads to an improved work-life balance.As a father, these factors became increasingly relevant to my life and I began to wonder how we could change the profession in the UK to be more aligned with the Nordic way of thinking. Being a firm believer in grassroots / bottom up change I decided to create an organisation, Nordic Locums, to help fellow like minded veterinarians to experience the lifestyle and culture of the Nordic countries and to fall back in love with the profession they had trained so hard and so long to join. Nordic Locums was created in 2016 and since then we have placed many temporary (Locum) and permanent vets into clinics in the Nordics and given them the opportunity to experience working abroad.The long term goal of Nordic Locums is to substantially transform the veterinary profession by allowing the vets of today, who will be the clinic leaders of the future, to personally experience the healthy working culture of the Nordic countries and to then lead the change at home to create a better working environment for themselves and their colleagues.