If you manage a veterinary practice, you've probably felt it for a while: the traditional model of full-time work in vet med is quietly disappearing. Now the data backs it up. Instinct Science, in partnership with UserEvidence, surveyed 959 veterinary professionals across general practice, specialty, emergency, and urgent care, and found that only 10% of practices still have veterinarians working full-time. The findings were reported in Today's Veterinary Business by Instinct founder and CEO Caleb Frankel, VMD.
Flexibility Has Become the Baseline for Keeping Veterinary Teams
Part-time roles, four-day workweeks, and alternative scheduling have moved from "nice to have" to standard practice, and survey respondents identified them as a major key to staff retention. That matches what we see every day on Hound, where demand for relief work, part-time roles, and flexible schedules keeps climbing.
The catch? Staffing is also the biggest barrier to offering that flexibility. In general practice, 60% of respondents said staffing shortages keep them from offering more flexible schedules. In emergency and specialty medicine, 85% named staffing as their top challenge.
In other words: flexibility helps you keep people, but you need people to offer flexibility. Practices that crack this loop first will have a real hiring advantage.
Hiring Alone Isn't Closing the Gap
In specialty and emergency settings, more than half of practices hired additional full-time staff last year, yet nearly a third still reported working more hours. Caseload volume and complexity are growing faster than staffing models can keep up.
The survey's takeaway is one we'd echo: hiring more people is necessary, but it isn't sufficient. The work itself has to be rethought: how schedules are built, how tasks are distributed across the team, and where technology can take friction out of the day. Nearly half of general practices now use AI in some capacity, and 91% adopted or changed at least one technology system in the past year.
Burnout and Compassion Fatigue Have Declined Since Their 2023 Peak
Buried in the data is some of the best news vet med has had in a while: reported stress, compassion fatigue, and mental health challenges have declined from their 2023 peak. The interventions practices have been making (better scheduling, more intentional team support, workflow improvements) appear to be working.
The wellbeing crisis in veterinary medicine is not fixed, but the needle is moving, and it's moving because practices changed how they treat their people.
Practice managers don't have to wait for a hiring pipeline to catch up before acting on any of this. Building flexibility into a role ahead of when a candidate has to ask for it is a lever they can pull today. Auditing how work actually moves through the practice costs nothing extra, either, and often surfaces more than another job posting would.
When a team keeps growing but its hours don't shrink, the model is usually the actual bottleneck, not the headcount. The drop in burnout since 2023 lines up with the same scheduling and team-support changes surveyed practices have been making, a sign the fix is already working where practices have tried it.