A veterinary workforce lesson in how to help during crisis
Bottom line
Veterinary communicator Catherine Haskins used a new Aug. 1 essay in Animal Health News and Views to make a simple point with workforce implications: when a colleague is in crisis, generic offers of help often miss the mark, while specific, practical support tends to matter more. In “When Someone You Love is Hurting,” Haskins draws on personal experiences, including a family loss and her husband’s severe heart attack, alongside a co-contributor’s experiences with trauma and loss, to argue that support works best when it removes decisions, like covering a shift, coordinating meals, or handling errands, instead of asking overwhelmed people to identify what they need. She explicitly connects that lesson to veterinary medicine, writing that team members often remember who “showed up,” not who found the perfect words. (animalhealthnewsandviews.com)
Why it matters: For veterinary professionals, the piece lands in a broader conversation about burnout, grief, compassion fatigue, and workforce retention. Recent literature has framed veterinary practice as an environment shaped by cumulative emotional labor, moral distress, and repeated exposure to caregiver grief, while peer-support researchers have argued that structured responses after stressful events can improve wellbeing and retention. AAHA has also highlighted the growing role of veterinary social workers in helping teams and clients navigate grief, conflict, and trauma, with some hospitals treating that support as an operating necessity tied to lower turnover and stronger client retention. Haskins’ essay doesn’t announce a program or policy, but it reinforces a practical culture shift many practices are already considering: making support concrete, organized, and team-based rather than informal and passive. (pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)
What to watch: Expect this conversation to keep moving from awareness to operations, including more formal peer-support systems, grief resources, and possibly wider use of veterinary social work models inside practices and hospitals. (pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)
A new commentary from veterinary industry communicator Catherine Haskins is putting a familiar workplace habit under the microscope: telling someone in crisis, “Let me know if you need anything.” In her Aug. 1 article, “When Someone You Love is Hurting,” published by Animal Health News and Views, Haskins argues that the phrase is compassionate, but often not especially useful when a person’s emotional bandwidth is already gone. Instead, she says the most meaningful support is specific, practical, and proactive. (animalhealthnewsandviews.com)
The piece is rooted in personal experience, not a new clinical study or corporate announcement. Haskins recounts lessons shaped first by the loss of her nephew, and later by her husband’s severe heart attack during travel. A second voice in the piece, Beckie, describes years marked by major loss, a motorcycle accident, and a house fire that killed three pets and a close friend. Their shared conclusion is that people in crisis often can’t easily answer open-ended offers of help, even when those offers are sincere. (animalhealthnewsandviews.com)
That leads to the article’s core recommendation: remove decisions instead of adding them. Haskins and her co-author point to concrete actions, such as bringing dinner at a set time, picking up groceries, researching specialists or community resources, covering a work shift, coordinating meals, and sending low-pressure check-in texts that don’t require a response. They also suggest a more useful fallback when someone isn’t sure how to help: ask whether there’s a point person coordinating support. (animalhealthnewsandviews.com)
Haskins then brings the message directly into veterinary medicine. She writes that the profession is built on compassion, but that teams often default to “safe” language when a colleague faces a personal crisis because they’re afraid of saying the wrong thing. Her argument is that what colleagues remember most in hard moments is not polished language, but practical presence, who covered the shift, handled the details, or simply stayed close. That framing fits with Haskins’ broader role as a longtime veterinary industry communicator focused on professional culture and connection. (animalhealthnewsandviews.com)
The wider industry context helps explain why this message may resonate now. Recent scholarship has described veterinary practice as a setting where emotional labor, repeated exposure to suffering and death, and limited organizational resources can contribute to burnout, moral distress, and other mental health strain. Another recent paper on peer support after clinical incidents argues that structured support systems may improve clinician wellbeing and retention, especially because patient death is a common trigger for distress. (pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)
Industry voices have been pushing similar ideas from an operational angle. AAHA has reported on the expanding role of veterinary social workers, who support both teams and pet parents around grief, trauma, conflict, and difficult decision-making. In that reporting, leaders at emergency and referral settings described veterinary social work as a way to reduce emotional load, mentor teams, and potentially improve retention and referrals. One hospital executive told AAHA that, as pet parent attachment deepens and staffing shortages continue, the need for this kind of support is likely to grow. (aaha.org)
Why it matters: For veterinary professionals, this essay is less about sentiment than systems. Practices already know their teams are carrying heavy emotional workloads, but many still rely on informal, individual gestures when colleagues are struggling. Haskins’ piece suggests a more actionable model: support that is specific, distributed, and easy to accept. In practical terms, that could mean managers normalizing shift coverage in emergencies, appointing support coordinators, building meal-train or resource lists, training leads in trauma-informed communication, or partnering with veterinary social workers and peer-support programs where available. Those steps may sound small, but in a workforce worried about burnout and retention, they can shape whether people feel cared for by their teams. (animalhealthnewsandviews.com)
What to watch: The next phase of this conversation will likely center on whether practices turn goodwill into infrastructure, through formal peer-support pathways, clearer crisis-response norms, and broader integration of grief and mental health resources for both staff and pet parents. (pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)