A veterinary group running three or four hospitals does not have three or four staffing problems. It has one workforce spread across buildings that draw from the same shrinking pool of local relief vets, techs, and support staff. Treating each hospital's staffing as its own island is the most common reason multi-location groups end up paying more for coverage than a single well-run hospital would.
Why Location-by-Location Staffing Breaks Down as a Group Grows
A single hospital can run relief staffing on instinct: one manager knows the two or three people who pick up shifts and calls them directly. That instinct stops working once a group crosses two or three locations, because now several managers are independently calling the same regional pool of relief professionals, often for overlapping dates, without knowing what a sister location already offered.
The result is quiet, expensive competition inside the same company. One hospital pays a premium rate to lock in a relief vet for a Saturday, not realizing a location twenty minutes away already had that person penciled in at a lower rate. Multiply that across a dozen locations and a group can be paying inflated relief costs for coverage a shared calendar would have caught for free.
Labor conditions make this worse before they make it better. John Volk, a senior consultant at Brakke Consulting, speaking to AVMA said:
That's exactly the environment where a group with a real workforce strategy pulls ahead of one still running each hospital as its own hiring silo.
What a Shared Relief Bench Actually Requires
A workforce strategy across multiple hospitals means building one relief bench the whole group draws from, with visibility into who is available where. That requires three things a single-location practice can skip but a group cannot:
The practices that get this right treat their relief bench the same way they'd treat any shared resource across locations, like inventory or a regional specialist referral list: centrally visible, locally usable.
Sizing a Float Pool Without Guessing
Most groups that build a shared bench oversize it at first, recruiting broadly and hoping enough people say yes. Then they discover headcount was never the real question. What matters is how many relief professionals are actually willing to work at each specific location, and a float pool is only as useful as its overlap with where the gaps actually happen.
The practical starting point is pulling the last two or three months of unfilled shifts by location and looking for the pattern: is it concentrated at one site's weekend shifts, or spread evenly across the group? A pool built to cover a pattern that doesn't actually exist just adds administrative overhead without closing any real gap.
This is also where Hound has tracked a related but distinct pressure: groups that skip building internal relief capacity and instead absorb a location into a larger corporate structure often see staff and client experience suffer in ways leadership doesn't anticipate. A shared relief bench is a way for an independently minded group to get the coverage benefits of scale without giving up local control.
Getting workforce strategy right across multiple hospitals isn't about hiring faster than the market allows. It's about making sure the people already willing to work for the group aren't quietly working against each other's schedules, and that only happens with real visibility into who's covering what, and where.