Veterinary medicine attracts people driven by purpose. But purpose alone cannot sustain a profession that routinely asks its workforce to absorb emotional trauma, ethical distress, physical demands, and compassion fatigue, often within the span of a single shift.
That is the argument Gregory Carastro, LVT, CVBL, laid out in a recent piece for AAHA Trends. Carastro, a director on the AAHA Board and the hospital administrator and director of human resources at Veterinary Medical Center of Long Island, makes a direct case: building a workplace where veterinary teams genuinely thrive is not just an ethical obligation for practice leaders. It is a strategic one.
The Cost of Ignoring Culture
Carastro opens with a challenge to how most practice leaders spend their attention. The traditional measures of practice performance, patient outcomes, client satisfaction, operational efficiency, and financial sustainability, all matter. But there is another metric that deserves equal attention: "the wellbeing of the people who make exceptional veterinary care possible."
That framing lands differently in veterinary medicine than it would in most industries. Veterinary teams move from celebrating a successful emergency surgery to helping a family say goodbye to a beloved companion, sometimes within the same hour. They absorb client grief, workplace injuries, long shifts, staffing shortages, and significant educational debt. Resilience, Carastro notes, cannot compensate for a structurally unhealthy work environment.
Psychological Safety Is a Patient Safety Issue
One of the more striking arguments in Carastro's piece is that psychological safety has direct consequences for patient care, not just employee wellbeing.
When technicians hesitate to question a medication dosage, when assistants are uncomfortable flagging unsafe equipment, when interns fear asking for clarification, patient care suffers. The inverse is also true. Teams where people feel safe to speak up, admit uncertainty, and challenge each other respectfully catch errors earlier, learn faster, and deliver better outcomes.
Sustainable Workloads, Not Wellness Theater
Carastro draws a clear line between wellness initiatives that generate awareness and the structural changes that actually prevent burnout.
The practical checklist he offers is specific: patient-to-clinician ratios, technician utilization, administrative burden, overtime trends, on-call frequency, break compliance, schedule predictability. These are not soft metrics. They are the upstream conditions that determine whether a team remains functional over years rather than months.
Benefits That Match the Job
Carastro also argues that employee benefits should be designed around what veterinary professionals actually experience, not adapted from generic corporate packages. He points specifically to bereavement leave that covers companion animal loss, mental health counseling with minimal access barriers, continuing education funding, student loan assistance, and flexible scheduling when operationally possible. Each signals whether an organization understands the profession it employs.
The piece addresses recognition, too. Veterinary professionals are often motivated by purpose rather than praise, but that should never be read as not needing acknowledgment. A handwritten note after a difficult shift, public recognition of exceptional teamwork, sharing positive client feedback: these cost almost nothing and communicate that leadership is paying attention.
Measuring What Matters
Carastro closes with a call to treat employee wellbeing as a measurable strategic indicator, alongside revenue and client satisfaction. Retention, voluntary turnover, internal promotion rates, engagement survey results, exit interview trends: these metrics surface organizational health problems long before they become crises.
The profession is competing for talented people. Organizations known for psychological safety, sustainable workloads, and genuine investment in their teams will recruit and retain better.