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Veterinary burnout: what the data says actually changes it

Serious psychological distress among veterinarians rose from 6.4% to 9.7% between the two most recent Merck studies, and among support staff it runs at 18.1% — nearly double. The named driver is not resilience. It is staffing.

Veterinary · August 26, 2026

The numbers, and who they belong to

The Merck Animal Health Veterinary Wellbeing Study is the most substantial recurring dataset on this subject. Its third edition, conducted in autumn 2021 and published with a companion support-staff study, reported:[1][2]

Serious psychological distress among veterinarians rose from 6.4% in the previous study to 9.7%.[1]

The support-staff column is the finding that gets least attention and deserves most. On both measures the non-veterinarian team is worse off — burnout at half of respondents, distress at nearly double the veterinarian rate. Subsequent work published in JAVMA examined the specific factors associated with wellbeing and burnout among nonveterinarian team members, treating them as a population in their own right rather than an afterthought.[3]

Most practice wellness provision is designed the other way round.

What the research names as the cause

The barriers identified are specific, and neither is about individual coping:[1]

1. Shortage of qualified staff
2. Not all clinic employees having access to the same mental health tools as veterinarians

Both are structural. Both are things a practice controls. Neither is addressed by a resilience module.

This matters because the standard response to burnout data is to fund something aimed at individuals — mindfulness sessions, an employee assistance line, a wellness week. Those are not harmful. But if the named driver is that the practice is two people short, then asking the remaining staff to build resilience is asking them to personally absorb a staffing decision. Teams generally recognise that, which is why such programmes are often received with more cynicism than gratitude.

It is worth noting the trajectory is not uniformly bad. AVMA has since reported the profession moving in a better direction on mental health overall.[4] The support-staff gap, however, has been consistent across studies.

The loop between burnout and turnover

Practice turnover averages 29.7% — 35% for technicians and 44% for other support staff.[5] Set that against a support-staff burnout rate of 49.6% and the relationship is not subtle.

The sequence, which most practices will recognise:

1. A support role goes unfilled — technician vacancies average almost 13 months to fill[5]
2. The remaining team absorbs the work
3. Burnout rises fastest in exactly the group already worst affected
4. Someone else leaves
5. The practice is now two short, and the search is longer

Each turn of that loop makes the next turn more likely. It is also why interventions aimed at step 3 do not hold: the loop is driven from step 1.

AAHA's retention work points the same way — the reasons people give for leaving are predominantly workload, support and culture rather than pay.[6] Pay matters, and underpaying will lose people. But a raise does not reduce a caseload.

Why "resilience" is the wrong frame

Three reasons, worth being blunt about.

It misattributes cause. If half of your support staff report high burnout, that is a property of the environment, not a coincidence of who you hired. Fifty percent of a population does not simultaneously develop a personal failing.

It transfers responsibility downward. Resilience training tells the person absorbing the problem that solving it is their job. That is demoralising in a specific way: it is not merely unhelpful, it communicates that the structural problem is not going to be addressed.

It is measured on the wrong outcome. Attendance and satisfaction scores for a wellness programme are not turnover, vacancy duration, or overtime hours. Those three are the numbers that would move if anything real had changed.

None of this is an argument against mental health provision. It is an argument for extending it to the whole team — which the research explicitly names as a gap — while fixing the staffing constraint that is generating the demand for it.

What changes it

Structural, in rough order of effect.

1. Close the vacancies. This is the intervention with the most direct line to the named cause. It is also the hardest, which is why it gets displaced by easier things. A practice that is fully staffed has a different burnout profile from one that is not, regardless of what else it does.

2. Use credentialed technicians at their scope. Over half report being underutilized, and lack of utilization is the top reason they give for leaving. Correcting it improves their experience and removes work from veterinarians — the only lever on this list that helps both groups at once.

3. Extend mental health provision to everyone. The research names unequal access explicitly. If the veterinarians have an EAP and the technicians do not, the group with 18.1% serious distress is the group without support.

4. Protect time in a way that is actually protected. Administrative time that is the first thing sacrificed when the day runs over is not protected time; it is a scheduling fiction. Either it survives a busy day or it does not exist.

5. Cover rota gaps with relief rather than with your own staff. An uncovered shift is absorbed by people already at capacity, which is step 2 of the loop. Relief cover is cheap against the cost of the resignation it prevents.

6. Measure the right things. Vacancy duration by role, overtime hours by person, turnover by role calculated annually, and time from resignation to replacement. If you cannot state your technician turnover rate from memory, that is the first thing to fix.

Filling the gap is the intervention — Job orders on PayRecruiter go to Talent Partners who have worked in veterinary practice, and several work a role in parallel rather than one recruiter's queue. When the named driver of burnout is a staffing shortage, closing the vacancy is the wellbeing programme.

The six-question review

Quarterly, and it takes twenty minutes.

1. What is our turnover rate by role — and specifically for technicians?
2. How many roles are currently unfilled, and for how long?
3. How many overtime hours did each person work last quarter?
4. Does everyone have access to the same mental health provision, or only the veterinarians?
5. Are credentialed technicians working at their scope, and how do we know?
6. In the last three exit conversations, what reason was given — and did we act on it?

The one-line version

The research names a staffing shortage as the driver and support staff as the worst affected. Those two facts together mean the most effective wellbeing intervention available to most practices is filling the vacancy — and extending to the whole team the support the veterinarians already have.