Low-stress care gains traction as a staff safety strategy

Low-stress veterinary care is getting fresh attention through an AVMA Veterinary Vertex podcast that ties calmer patient handling directly to staff safety. The December 13, 2025, episode, “Calmer Pets, Safer Vets: The Power of Low-Stress Care,” highlights a related JAVMA paper on injury patterns in small animal general practice and argues that safer veterinary workplaces depend on systems, not just individual handling skill. That systems framing is consistent with the podcast’s broader editorial approach: other Veterinary Vertex episodes have focused on practical clinic behaviors such as agenda setting at the start of appointments to improve efficiency, communication, and team workflow. (podcasts.apple.com)

The backdrop is familiar to most clinics: veterinary teams face a high burden of animal-related injuries, and restraint-heavy workflows can worsen both patient stress and staff risk. CDC says veterinary medicine and animal care workers face substantial injury risk from bites, scratches, kicks, crush injuries, and musculoskeletal strain during restraint and treatment. AAHA’s behavior management guidelines have long warned that manual restraint and forceful handling can compromise outcomes, increase stress, and reduce client willingness to return if visits reliably trigger anxiety in the animal. (cdc.gov)

The new study at the center of the discussion, “Practice-wide certification in stress-reducing animal care lowers the rate of patient-inflicted injuries to veterinary staff in small animal general practices,” concluded that staff-wide or practice-wide certification in stress-reducing care programs can reduce occupational injury associated with animal handling. According to the study summary and subsequent reporting, three out of four fully certified practices reported injuries less than once a month, versus 45% of practices with some or no certified team members. Those not fully certified were about 3.5 times more likely to report injuries monthly or more often. The programs referenced included Fear Free, Low Stress Handling, and Feline Veterinary Medical Association Cat Friendly approaches. (pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)

That finding fits with broader changes in companion animal practice. Fear Free says its certification model is designed to prevent and alleviate fear, anxiety, and stress, and its practice certification requires team-level implementation rather than isolated individual training. AAHA’s reporting from Fear Free-certified hospitals also suggests the approach changes day-to-day decision-making, including a greater willingness to pause care, reschedule, or use sedation when an anxious patient cannot be handled safely. One veterinary assistant quoted by AAHA said medication can make visits easier on both the animal and the team, and that the approach reduced the physical wear of the workday. (fearfreepets.com)

The Veterinary Vertex platform has also been highlighting another operational theme relevant here: communication structure. In a separate episode on agenda setting, podcast guests described teaching students and practitioners to identify the client’s full agenda right at the start of the visit, a skill they said had become a major focus of the curriculum over the past eight years. The rationale was straightforward: when teams know the client’s priorities up front, appointments can run more efficiently and with fewer surprises. That is not the same as low-stress handling, but it points in the same direction—safer, smoother care often depends on repeatable systems around the exam, not just what happens when an animal is already escalating.

Industry commentary has increasingly linked low-stress care with workforce sustainability, not just animal welfare. Today’s Veterinary Business framed the JAVMA paper as evidence that stress-reducing care can mean fewer injuries, less turnover, and lower liability. Separate open-access research on companion animal practice safety culture has also argued that injury prevention is tied to reporting culture, team cohesion, and workplace wellbeing, suggesting that handling protocols are only one part of a larger safety system. That’s an inference, but it aligns with the podcast’s central message that safety is a system-level outcome. (todaysveterinarybusiness.com)

Why it matters: For veterinary professionals, the practical takeaway is that low-stress care may deserve a place beside OSHA-style safety thinking, training, and workflow design. A calmer patient can mean safer venipuncture, fewer escalation events, less need for high-force restraint, and potentially better diagnostic accuracy, since AAHA notes that heavy-handed handling can affect case outcomes. It can also support client retention: the same guidelines note that compliance and visit frequency decline when pet parents expect veterinary visits to cause anxiety. And as the Veterinary Vertex agenda-setting discussion suggests, communication habits that clarify concerns early may help teams use time better and reduce pressure inside the exam room. In a labor-constrained profession already managing burnout and injury exposure, that combination of welfare, safety, efficiency, and client experience is hard to ignore. (aaha.org)

What to watch: The next question is whether practices move from informal low-stress habits to formal, hospital-wide standards, including staff certification, previsit pharmaceutical protocols, environment changes, and injury tracking. Watch, too, for veterinary schools, corporate groups, and accreditation-minded practices to treat low-stress handling less as a culture add-on and more as a measurable safety and quality metric—potentially alongside communication skills such as agenda setting that improve efficiency and help teams surface client concerns before the visit goes off track. (pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)