If wellness programming worked the way we've been told it does, burnout scores should be falling. They aren't.
According to the 2025 AVMA Report on the Economic State of the Veterinary Profession, the average Professional Quality of Life (ProQOL) burnout score for U.S. veterinarians in 2024 was 26.4 out of 50. That's identical to 2023 and within the range classified as moderate burnout.
Every major vet publication has run burnout coverage for the better part of a decade. Conferences have wellness tracks. Practices have wellness committees. And the number hasn't moved.
That's worth sitting with for a second. Because it suggests the profession has been treating the wrong problem.
This blog covers one section of our 2026 Veterinary IV Pump Survey. The full report includes data on equipment spending, staffing costs, fluid therapy trends, and business sustainability across 114 companion animal practices.
Support staff are in worse shape than veterinarians
Most burnout coverage focuses on veterinarians. The 2023 Merck Animal Health Veterinary Wellbeing Study IV, published in JAVMA, shows that's the wrong lens.
Serious psychological distress among non-veterinarian practice staff is twice as prevalent as among veterinarians. Both groups exceed the general U.S. population. The people absorbing the most damage in the profession are the techs, assistants, and front desk staff who keep the practice running.
The same people who are hardest to hire. The same people who turn over fastest. The same people who, when they leave, take institutional knowledge with them and force the remaining team to cover the gap.
This isn't a coincidence. The staff doing the most repetitive, cognitively demanding, high-stakes work are also the ones closest to breaking.
The satisfaction gap tells you what's broken
Image courtesy of Envato
The AVMA report includes a data point that deserves more attention than it gets.
Satisfaction with... | Satisfied or very satisfied |
Their job | 71.4% |
Compensation | 72.4% |
Lifestyle | 69.1% |
The profession as a whole | 51.9% |
More than 2 in 3 veterinarians say they're satisfied with their job, compensation, and lifestyle. But only about 1 in 2 are satisfied with the profession.
That 20-point gap is a diagnosis. People love the clinical work. They love their patients, their teams, the day-to-day of practicing medicine. What they don't love is the structural condition of the profession: the understaffing, the workload, the pace, the equipment headaches, the feeling that they're always one sick tech away from a bad day.
No amount of resilience training closes that gap. You can't meditate your way out of a staffing shortage.
The 86% problem
Our 2026 survey of 114 companion animal practices lines up with the AVMA findings in a specific way.
86% of practices are operating short-staffed.
51% have annual turnover above 20%.
82% say licensed vet techs are the hardest role to fill.
42% are turning away 10% or more of appointment requests because they don't have the staff.
22% of practice leaders told us nothing they've tried for retention has worked.
When 86% of practices are short-staffed, the remaining team absorbs the gap. That means longer shifts, more cases per tech, more CRIs to monitor, more alarms to respond to, more drug calculations to double-check, more of everything.
Now layer that on top of a profession where burnout hasn't improved in two years and support staff are experiencing psychological distress at twice the rate of veterinarians. That's how you end up with a burnout score stuck at 26.4 for two years running.
What reduces burnout
The practices that move the needle on burnout aren't the ones with the best wellness posters. They're the ones that systematically reduce the repetitive, anxiety-producing tasks that wear staff down.
Things that compound burnout in a typical practice day:
Manually counting drops on a gravity drip while trying to triage two other patients.
Running back every 15 minutes to verify a CRI rate.
Responding to pump alarms where 90% are nuisance alerts and 10% are real.
Doing drug concentration math at 2 a.m. under pressure.
Handing off a case to a colleague who wasn't trained on the specific pump model in use.
None of that gets fixed by a meditation app. All of it gets reduced by better equipment and better process.
One practice owner in our survey timed it: his techs spend 15-20 minutes per shift silencing alarms and resetting pumps. Across four techs, that's over an hour of productive time lost every day. That hour is interruption, cortisol, and cognitive load spread across the shift. That's what burnout is built out of.
Equipment is a wellbeing issue
Image courtesy of Envato
This is the part of the burnout conversation that gets left out of most wellness articles, probably because equipment isn't a feel-good topic. But it matters.
Pump alarms are a known contributor to clinical staff stress. Our 2026 survey found that 69% of practices experience pump alarms or errors at least weekly, and 35% deal with them daily or more. The top training challenge for new staff on CRI pumps isn't programming the flow rate. It's recognizing which alarms are real and which are the pump being dramatic. That skill takes months to develop and costs thousands of cortisol spikes to build.
A practice with reliable pumps, a clear maintenance schedule, and enough equipment to cover peak caseload has a materially different burnout profile than a practice running a mixed fleet of aging units that scream for attention three times a day.
That's an operations solution, and it's one of the most effective wellness interventions a practice can make.
Where to start
Wellness programs are worth having. Keep them. But don't expect them to move the burnout score on their own. The AVMA data is clear that they haven't.
If you want to reduce burnout in your practice, audit the repetitive, high-stakes tasks your team does every day and ask which ones can be automated, simplified, or eliminated. Manual fluid monitoring, equipment troubleshooting, alarm fatigue, and mixed-fleet complexity are where most practices find the biggest gains.
None of this is glamorous. None of it shows up in a wellness brochure. All of it reduces the grinding, repetitive stress that builds burnout over time.
Burnout is an operations problem
Burnout in vet medicine is treated as a feelings problem. The AVMA's flat burnout score over two years says it's a process and equipment problem that shows up as feelings.
The practices that will move their burnout numbers aren't the ones with the most resilience programming. They're the ones that take a hard look at every repetitive, anxiety-producing task on the floor and ask whether it still needs to exist in its current form.
At AIV Vet, we make infusion pumps and fluid warmers for veterinary practices, and we see this play up close. The practices that tell us their team stress is going down aren't the ones that bought wellness software. They're the ones that stopped counting drops and started trusting their equipment. If you want to see what our refurbished IV pumps, VetroCRI syringe pump, and IVetMATE fluid warmer look like in a practice, get in touch. No pressure. Just a conversation about what's weighing your team down.
Sources
- AIV Vet 2026 Veterinary IV Pump Survey
- 2025 AVMA Report on the Economic State of the Veterinary Profession
- Merck Animal Health 2023 Veterinary Wellbeing Study IV / JAVMA 2024