Fourteen veterinary organizations, from the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA) to Merck Animal Health to the National Association of Veterinary Technicians in America, just agreed on something the profession has never actually had: a shared definition of what "veterinary wellbeing" means. AVMA News reports that the Veterinary Wellbeing Collective published the definition in a special report in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association (JAVMA), capping off more than a year of work to coordinate what had been a decade of scattered, overlapping wellness efforts.
Why the Profession Needed One Definition
For the past ten years, individual practices, schools, and nonprofits have each built their own wellbeing initiatives largely in isolation: a wellness day here, a peer-support hotline there, a burnout survey somewhere else. The Collective's own report calls this out directly, pointing to "the need for more communication and coordination within this field of practice."
Without a shared definition, two practices could both claim to prioritize wellbeing while measuring completely different things, or measuring nothing at all. The new definition splits the concept into two parts:
That second half matters as much as the first. It reframes wellbeing as something a practice's own policies and culture actively produce or block, not just an individual's personal resilience project.
Who's Behind the New Wellbeing Coalition
The Collective grew out of a July 2025 roundtable hosted by Merck Animal Health, drawing 16 leaders from academia, industry, and veterinary associations, including the American Association of Veterinary Medical Colleges, Not One More Vet, and MentorVet, a veterinary mentorship and wellbeing organization. Since then, the group has organized into four working groups: research and measurement tools, organizational interventions such as human resources (HR) policies and onboarding practices, external resources, and communications.
Merck's own 2023 Veterinary Wellbeing Study, conducted with AVMA, had already found that mental health stigma is lessening and more resources exist than a decade ago. What it hadn't found was a way to compare progress across practices using the same yardstick, which is exactly the gap this new definition is meant to close.
The Diagnostic Practices Can Start Using Today
The Collective's next phase is building a centralized database of wellbeing resources and shared messaging tools, but that timeline is measured in months, not days. Practices don't have to wait for a national toolkit to start applying the same logic locally: measuring both how individual team members feel and whether the practice's own systems, like scheduling, onboarding, and feedback loops, are actually built to support that.
That's the same systemic-versus-individual split the definition draws, and it's worth reading as a diagnostic, not just a philosophy. A practice that hands out perks while ignoring the psychological safety of its actual day-to-day systems is optimizing the wrong half of the definition, no matter how good the perks are. The Collective's shared resources are still months from launching, but the definition itself is usable today: a practice doesn't need a national rollout to start asking both halves of that question about its own team.