Better scheduling emerges as a practical burnout lever in vet practice: full analysis

CURRENT FULL VERSION: A new article in Today’s Veterinary Nurse, published March 11, 2026, makes a straightforward case: better scheduling may be one of the fastest, most controllable ways for veterinary practices to improve staff wellbeing and career satisfaction. The piece, “Optimizing Work Schedules in Veterinary Practice: Impact on Staff Wellbeing and Career Satisfaction,” says small scheduling changes can reduce burnout pressure, improve communication, and support safer patient care. (todaysveterinarynurse.com)

The timing matters. After years of pandemic-driven strain, the profession appears to be moving out of pure surge mode. The AVMA’s 2025 Economic State of the Profession report, based on its 2024 Census of Veterinarians, found veterinarians worked an average of 42.4 hours a week overall, with associates at 40.9 hours and private practitioners at 41.5. Today’s Veterinary Business separately reported that mean weekly hours are down from a 2021 peak and nearing a return to pre-pandemic levels. In other words, some of the acute pressure may be easing, but practices are still left with systems built for a different moment. (ebusiness.avma.org)

The Today’s Veterinary Nurse article draws on a 2025 master’s thesis by Ostrin and Marshall and describes a mixed-methods pilot and primary study of veterinary professionals across roles and settings. Respondents linked outdated scheduling patterns with burnout, reduced recovery time, and avoidable friction in daily operations. The article says 60% of respondents felt trapped by their schedule, 75.6% preferred predictable scheduling patterns, and 80% agreed flexible schedules would improve overall wellbeing. It then turns those findings into operational recommendations for general practice, emergency, and referral hospitals, emphasizing predictable rotations, protected breaks, overlap staffing during high-volume periods, and appointment templates aligned with real staffing levels. That approach closely matches Not One More Vet’s advice that sustainable schedules should include dedicated administrative blocks, lunch protection, and enough structure to help clinicians leave on time rather than letting documentation and callbacks spill into the evening. (todaysveterinarynurse.com)

The operational details are practical rather than sweeping. Examples include defined closing task lists for veterinary nurses, overlap shifts to preserve lunch coverage for client service teams, protected daily blocks for callbacks and records for veterinarians, and repeatable rotations with a workable swap policy for managers. The article also warns that scheduling reform can backfire if “flexibility” becomes unpredictability, if breaks exist on paper without coverage, or if redesigns are built around one role while ignoring the rest of the team. (todaysveterinarynurse.com)

Outside commentary broadly supports that direction. A 2024 JAVMA study found work-life balance, effective coping mechanisms for stress, and positive clinic culture were significant predictors of better wellbeing and lower burnout among veterinary professionals. Earlier studies cited in the article point to persistent burnout risk among technicians and support staff, including a Frontiers in Veterinary Science paper on occupational burnout in veterinary technicians and a multicenter study in specialty teaching hospitals that found burnout levels higher than those reported for a contemporaneous trauma nurse cohort in human medicine. A 2021 industry survey from Veterinary Integration Solutions likewise reported rising burnout across groups, with younger professionals remaining the most burned-out cohort, veterinary technicians showing the highest burnout by role, and higher caseload correlating directly with higher burnout. (pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)

The systems lens also matters for patient safety. In a recent dvm360 interview, veterinary anesthesiologist Lydia Love, DVM, DACVAA, argued that mistakes in clinical practice should be treated as signals to examine the system around the error rather than simply blame individuals. She highlighted psychological safety, leader vulnerability, and tools such as surgical safety checklists and other cognitive aids that help teams communicate under pressure and trap errors before they reach patients. That complements the scheduling argument: if teams are rushed, fatigued, or afraid to speak up, safer care becomes harder to deliver consistently.

There is also a wider workforce context behind the article’s emphasis on sustainability. Recent commentary across the profession has underscored that stress is not only clinical but financial. Today’s Veterinary Business addressed a common but often unspoken issue directly, noting that veterinary professionals may need to seek lower-cost care for their own pets and that doing so reflects financial reality, not disloyalty. Vet Candy has also argued that many veterinary students and team members are struggling with basic affordability pressures, from food and transportation to debt load, and that the profession too often treats those pressures as personal shortcomings instead of structural problems. Schedule design will not solve compensation or debt, but more predictable hours and fewer unpaid overages can reduce one source of strain in an already stretched workforce.

That broader strain starts early. Vet Candy recently highlighted longitudinal research at Kansas State University showing that about one-third of first-year veterinary students reported depression levels above the clinical cutoff during their first and second semesters, with symptoms for some worsening over time under homesickness, academic pressure, and adjustment stress. Its accompanying commentary emphasized familiar survival themes: stop measuring yourself against peers’ outward performance, and treat rest as a built-in requirement rather than something earned only after the work is done. Those ideas echo the scheduling article’s core point that recovery time has to be designed into the system, because in veterinary medicine the work is never naturally finished.

Practical mental health support is part of the same conversation. PetMD recently noted that many practices still do not discuss mental health openly in team meetings and argued for immediate steps such as normalizing those conversations, sharing local and national mental health resources, and having leaders model candor about stress. That is relevant here because schedule redesign works best in a culture where people can say, early and without fear, that a day is unsafe, unsustainable, or simply not working.

Why it matters: For veterinary professionals, this is useful because it reframes burnout prevention as a systems question, not just an individual resilience problem. If hours are moderating but dissatisfaction persists, then the issue may be less about total time worked and more about how that time is structured: unpredictability, missed breaks, charting spillover, and uneven late stays. That has direct implications for retention, patient safety, and team communication. It also matters for recruiting younger clinicians, who the AVMA data suggest are working longer hours and carrying higher burnout scores than later-career peers. And because younger professionals and technicians have repeatedly emerged as higher-risk groups in burnout reporting, schedule design may be one of the few interventions practices can change quickly without waiting on larger labor-market fixes. (ebusiness.avma.org)

There’s also a business case. More predictable schedules can help practices preserve capacity without relying on constant overextension. Inference: as hospitals move away from pandemic-era demand patterns, schedule redesign may become one of the lowest-cost ways to improve morale and reduce turnover risk, especially when hiring remains difficult. The article’s emphasis on “quick wins without a full redesign” speaks to that reality. But the strongest version of that strategy likely combines scheduling with other low-cost systems supports, including clearer communication norms, mental health resource visibility, and simple checklists that reduce avoidable friction during busy shifts. (todaysveterinarynurse.com)

What to watch: The next step will likely be whether practices formalize these ideas into policy, such as protected administrative time, staggered lunch coverage, predictable rotations, and clearer late-stay rules, and whether future research ties those changes to measurable outcomes like turnover, medical error rates, and client experience. It will also be worth watching whether leaders pair schedule reform with broader psychological-safety and mental-health practices, because the evidence and commentary cited here point in the same direction: sustainable work is shaped not just by hours on paper, but by whether teams have enough time, enough recovery, and enough permission to speak up when the system is failing them. (todaysveterinarynurse.com)