After sixteen years in practice, Katie Lunn built her own mobile nursing service, bringing compassionate care to families no clinic could reach.

Katherine Lunn
RVN
Home Vet Nurse

The context

For sixteen years Katie Lunn gave everything to veterinary nursing, in small animal practice and referral hospitals. It was her calling. Then her daughter was diagnosed with autism, and the fixed shifts and unpredictable hours of practice could no longer fit around the child who needed her most. Katie faced a choice no nurse should have to make: the work she loved, or the family she loved. She refused to accept it had to be one or the other. In August 2026 she founded Home Vet Nurse, a mobile veterinary nursing service across Glasgow, Lanarkshire, Dumbartonshire and Ayrshire, so she could control her own time and keep nursing. In doing so she found the people the clinic model quietly fails: owners with no transport, housebound clients, families in emergency housing, and people facing the loss of a beloved pet who needed to be heard at home.

The action

Katie built a service from nothing and took it to the people who couldn’t reach a clinic. She now drives over 1,000 miles every month to reach them. She offers free appointments to clients living in emergency housing or who are in financial hardship, so that a family’s hardest circumstances never decide whether their pet is cared for. In order to ensure continuity of care, she built her own practice management system from the ground up so that every vet clinic has access to notes from Katies home visits. She sits with families through euthanasia and palliative care, with no waiting room, and no clock She gives them time to be heard and to say goodbye on their own terms. Every visit carries the clinical standards of her sixteen years in practice and referral hospitals. Nothing about it is second best, only closer to the people who need it.

The ripple effect

Within three months of opening, Home Vet Nurse was fully booked, week after week. That shows how many pets and families had nowhere else to turn. Animals who would have gone without are being treated. Families in emergency housing have been given dignity, not another barrier. Clients have said goodbye to their companions in their own living rooms, feeling heard and supported. The ripple reaches the profession too. Katie could have been lost to veterinary nursing because of family circumstances. Instead she built a way to keep nursing while raising her daughter, and in doing so reached people no practice was reaching. Her story shows what our profession gains when it makes room for flexibility, and what a community gains when a nurse refuses to give up her calling.

Voting opens 13 November.