Scheduling study puts veterinary wellbeing into operations: full analysis

CURRENT FULL VERSION: A new Today’s Veterinary Nurse article is putting a sharper operational lens on a familiar workforce problem: veterinary burnout. Drawing on a 2025 mixed-methods pilot and primary study of 51 veterinary professionals, the piece argues that small scheduling changes, especially more predictable work blocks, protected breaks, and role-aware flexibility, can improve staff wellbeing and support safer patient care. Among respondents, 72% preferred consecutive 3- to 4-day work blocks followed by equivalent rest periods, while 73% said flexible scheduling would improve their mental health and work-life balance. (todaysveterinarynurse.com)

The timing matters. According to the AVMA’s 2025 economic state report, veterinarians’ hours are finally moving down from pandemic-era peaks: the profession-wide average fell to 42.4 hours per week in 2024, down from 45.6 in 2021. But that doesn’t mean schedule pressure has disappeared. Full-time veterinarians still averaged 48.3 hours weekly in 2024, and averages were higher in some segments, including mixed animal, equine, and advanced education roles. (ebusiness.avma.org)

What stands out in the new article is its focus on how schedule design affects different team members differently. The piece says veterinary nurses often have the least control over their hours because their day expands with doctor flow, making “flexibility” feel less like autonomy and more like unpredictability. It also reframes breaks as a patient safety issue, not a perk: when breaks were built into schedules, 85% to 90% of respondents reported better mental clarity, fewer mistakes, and improved communication. The author’s practical recommendation is to engineer coverage so breaks happen in reality, not just in policy. That recommendation fits with broader guidance from Not One More Vet, which has argued that sustainable schedules should also include protected administrative blocks and lunch, with the explicit goal of helping clinicians leave on time rather than carrying unfinished work into the evening. (todaysveterinarynurse.com; nomv.org)

That framing aligns with broader literature. A peer-reviewed study indexed on PubMed, based on the Merck Animal Health Veterinarian Wellbeing Study III, found work-life balance is a key factor in reducing burnout and improving wellbeing in the profession. Another published study on workplace factors in veterinary medicine found 45.2% of respondents often or almost always worked beyond rostered shifts, 61.6% sometimes or almost never took regular breaks, and 61.7% felt they had little to no control over the structure of their workday. Those findings help explain why schedule predictability can have outsized effects on morale and retention. They also fit a wider pattern: a recent Southeast Asia workforce survey summarized by Vet Candy reported that 74% of respondents saw better work-life balance as essential to attracting and keeping veterinarians, while 64% said their practices had no formal or informal wellbeing initiatives at all. (pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)

Industry commentary has been moving in the same direction. dvm360 has previously argued that flexible scheduling and part-time staffing can support both work-life balance and practice performance, citing research suggesting veterinarians working roughly 40 hours per week or less may generate stronger revenue per hour than peers working longer schedules. More recently, Lydia Love, DVM, DACVAA, told dvm360 that safer veterinary teams depend on psychological safety and systems that reduce preventable human error, including checklists, cognitive aids, and communication structures that help teams maintain a shared mental model under pressure. PetMD has made a parallel point from the mental health side, noting that only 36% of practices discuss mental health openly at team meetings at least somewhat, and recommending immediate steps such as normalizing those conversations and maintaining a visible mental health resource list for staff. While those comments were not specific to this study, they reinforce the idea that wellbeing, safety, and team communication are operationally linked. (dvm360.com; petmd.com)

The scheduling conversation also sits inside a wider strain on the profession’s pipeline. Vet Candy recently highlighted longitudinal research at Kansas State University showing about one-third of first-year veterinary students reported depression levels above the clinical cutoff during their first and second semesters, with symptoms worsening for some over time. A companion commentary aimed at students and early-career veterinarians argued that rest has to be built into the structure of training because in veterinary education, as in practice, the work is effectively never “done.” That is one reason these scheduling debates matter beyond current staff retention: they shape what new graduates come to see as normal. (vetcandy.com)

Financial pressure is part of the same picture. In a Today’s Veterinary Business Q&A, a columnist noted that veterinary team members struggling to afford care for their own pets are far from alone, pointing to a PetSmart Charities-Gallup survey finding that more than half of U.S. pet owners skipped or declined needed veterinary care in the past year because of cost. Vet Candy has also argued that financial strain is a structural issue across the profession, affecting both students and veterinary technicians, not a private failure of budgeting or resilience. For employers, that is a reminder that schedule reform helps, but it does not erase affordability pressures, debt, or compensation constraints that also shape burnout and turnover. (todaysveterinarybusiness.com; vetcandy.com)

Why it matters: For veterinary professionals, the practical takeaway is that schedule reform may be more actionable than many larger workforce fixes. Pay, staffing shortages, and student debt are harder to solve at the clinic level. But practices can redesign shift blocks, build visible break coverage, define fair swap rules, create psychologically safer communication norms, and tailor scheduling expectations by role and career stage, including protected admin time for clinicians who are still building efficiency. That matters in a labor market where many clinicians want fewer hours, not more, and where burnout remains a retention threat even as pandemic demand normalizes. For teams serving pet parents, the likely downstream effects are not only better morale, but also fewer communication failures, fewer fatigue-related mistakes, and more sustainable continuity of care. (ebusiness.avma.org)

There are caveats. The new scheduling study was small, with 51 participants, and the Today’s Veterinary Nurse article is a practice-facing summary rather than a full journal publication. Some of its most compelling findings, including the reported benefits of breaks, are perception-based rather than objective clinical outcome measures. Some of the supporting material here, especially industry commentary and student-facing wellness pieces, is directional rather than high-level evidence. Still, the conclusions are broadly consistent with larger workforce, wellbeing, and safety research across veterinary medicine. (todaysveterinarynurse.com)

What to watch: The next question is whether practices turn these ideas into measurable policy changes, and whether future studies test outcomes such as turnover, medical error rates, schedule adherence, client experience, and use of mental health supports after adopting more predictable, role-specific scheduling models. Watch, too, for more attention to early-career schedule design, student transition support, and the financial realities facing veterinary staff, since those pressures are increasingly being discussed as part of the same retention problem rather than separate issues. (todaysveterinarynurse.com)