Better scheduling may be a practical lever for vet team wellbeing

A new article in Today's Veterinary Nurse is putting structure around a familiar problem in veterinary medicine: when scheduling feels flexible in theory but chaotic in practice, team wellbeing, communication, and patient care can all suffer. Published March 11, 2026, the piece draws on a mixed-methods survey of 51 veterinary professionals and offers a practical message for clinics: small scheduling changes, if they are predictable and role-aware, may do more for career satisfaction than another round of generic wellness messaging. (todaysveterinarynurse.com)

The timing matters. Veterinary work hours have come down from the peak pandemic years, but they haven't fully normalized. AVMA’s 2025 economic report says veterinarians averaged 42.4 hours per week in 2024, versus 45.6 in 2021, and full-time veterinarians still averaged just over 48 hours a week. Practice type also matters: full-time equine veterinarians averaged 57.7 hours, advanced education roles 56.2, and mixed animal veterinarians 52.6. That means even as the acute staffing crunch has eased, many teams are still operating in systems built around long days, spillover work, and inconsistent recovery time. (ebusiness.avma.org)

In the Today's Veterinary Nurse article, the author points to several recurring failure points in schedule redesign: flexibility that turns into unpredictability, breaks without coverage, schedules built around one role instead of the whole team, poor fit with peak-hour demand, and weak communication about why changes are happening. The article recommends starting with an internal assessment of preferred shift length, consecutive days worked, recovery time, and hard constraints such as childcare or medical needs, then running a 30- to 60-day pilot with clear success measures like on-time departures, break compliance, overtime, fatigue, and communication scores. (todaysveterinarynurse.com)

That framing is broadly consistent with prior veterinary workforce research. A 2020 study of veterinary technicians found that schedule control was the most significant predictor of lower emotional exhaustion, and the authors specifically encouraged practices to improve job satisfaction through nonmonetary changes, including greater control over schedules. Another multicenter study in specialty teaching hospitals found burnout was associated with high patient load, lack of help during sudden workload increases, and anxiety around supervisor communication, while also linking burnout to perceived medical errors and desire to leave the profession. A separate survey of 1,945 veterinarians found on-call duties negatively affected job satisfaction, wellbeing, and personal relationships, with the greatest impact reported by female associates. (pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)

Industry voices are increasingly tying schedule quality to broader safety and culture issues. In a recent dvm360 interview, anesthesiologist Lydia Love, DVM, DACVAA, argued that veterinary teams need systems that reduce error risk rather than assuming conscientious people can simply work harder. She emphasized psychological safety and tools like checklists to support communication under pressure. NOMV has made a similar case from a mental health angle, advising new graduates to look for schedules that include administrative blocks, protected lunch, and a realistic path to leaving work on time. (dvm360.com)

Why it matters: For veterinary leaders, the takeaway isn't just that burnout exists. It's that schedule design is one of the more actionable operational levers available. Predictable rotations, documented swap policies, protected callback and records time, and coverage plans for lunches or late-arriving cases can affect retention, morale, and possibly care quality without waiting for a larger labor-market reset. The evidence base here is still developing, and the Today's Veterinary Nurse survey was small and perception-based, so it shouldn't be overgeneralized. But its recommendations line up with broader literature showing that control, recovery time, staffing adequacy, and psychologically safe communication are closely tied to whether people can sustain clinical work. (todaysveterinarynurse.com)

What to watch: The next step will be whether practices move from informal schedule tweaks to measured pilots with retention, overtime, break adherence, and error-reporting data attached. If they do, scheduling may start to be treated less as an administrative necessity and more as a clinical operations strategy, especially in emergency, referral, and high-volume general practice settings where overload tends to show up first. (todaysveterinarynurse.com)