After 50 years of volunteer work for Lort Smith Animal Hospital, Virginia Edwards has come to realise the North Melbourne institution is as much about helping people as animals.

She says its prime role may be providing vet care to the needy, "but caring for the animals makes the owners happy and their quality of life improves as well as the animals'. It's a two-way street."

Today, pet therapy is widespread, but in the mid-1980s she joined a pioneering service run by her late friend, Joan Sturzaker​, taking strays from Lort Smith into hospitals and schools.

They watched clients drawing comfort and joy from having a pat, and a chat about their own pets.

Mrs Edwards remembers taking a rooster to a nursing home, where two elderly men, both originally from rural areas, were beguiled. "They almost fought over this jolly bird. They wanted to have it on their wheelchair, to sit with them."

As a child in the 1940s, her own parents weren't into pets.

But she was influenced by her beloved grandma, Vivien Clapp, wife of the head of the railways Harold Clapp, who had a beautiful black cat and would let Mrs Edwards dress it up and wheel it around Toorak in a pram.

In 1929, Mrs Clapp had been vice-president of the fledgling Animal Welfare League, and in the 1930s staged amateur plays to raise money for institutions including Lort Smith.

In turn, Mrs Edwards was on the Lort Smith board for 35 years, until last year. Apart from years of pet therapy visits, she has manned stalls at festivals, staffed the hospital's Collingwood opp shop, and staged many fundraising events.

She chaired the fundraising committee for the current hospital building, opened in 2000.

Much of her work is informal: she enjoys talking about the Lort Smith to strangers in shops and trams. She once befriended a man walking his dogs in Armadale and, when he died, he left $10,000 to the hospital.

Of the award, Mrs Edwards said: "I'm totally and utterly overwhelmed by it. I think it's a great honour, and I'm very grateful to those that felt I was worthy of it."

Mrs Edwards was a researcher for a 2003 book on the hospital's history, The Kindness of Strangers, and is helping organise the its 80th birthday. In future she wants to set up an archive.