My friend, a practice owner, just lost a veterinary technician. The technician gave her 2-week notice late Friday night by email, so when I spoke to my friend over the weekend, it was still unclear about why she was departing.
I see lots of discussion about the problems vet medicine has keeping support staff, and I have a hard time being shocked by these reporters. It’s honestly amazing to me that as many techs stay in this profession as do.
Someone who has the smarts, interpersonal skills, and attention to detail that it requires to be a veterinary technician can do a million other things that are lower stress and less physically demanding. I make a point to treat technicians I work with really well, partly out of a strange fear I have that they might suddenly quit to go work at a bank.
I don’t know why it’s banking that makes me nervous, but it is. I think it’s something about how quiet and calm banks are. Also, I imagine that the math skills we need to check fluid rates and drug doses are exactly the kind of math that you’d need as a teller.
Granted, I’ve never once known a tech to go work at a bank. Every time they leave the profession, they become things like nurses, EMTs, or teachers. I guess the desire to be a hero is stronger than the desire to shoot envelopes through that pneumatic tube for some people. It wouldn’t be for me. If I was a tech, I’d be eying Wachovia after every hard shift.
It’s those finance job thoughts that motivate me to ensure the techs feel appreciated, and to do what I can to make their days in the clinic interesting and engaging.
I see a lot of talk online about techs leaving the profession because of burnout, but I honestly don’t see that so much on the ground. The thing I see driving techs away is a mixture of stress-boredom, financial fatigue, and the belief that their long-term professional future will look exactly like their professional present and past.
Stress-boredom is the feeling that you are doing something monotonous and also it could go badly at any moment. I heard a psychologist talking recently about people overcoming fears through exposure. He was trying to make the point that, at some point, we’re physically incapable of panicking forever. The example he gave was: imagine you had someone who was terrified of snakes and you dropped them into a room they couldn’t get out of that was filled with non-dangerous snakes. Then he asked “How long would they stay terrified?” The correct answer is “until they tear through the wall like an unmedicated storm-phobic dog and kill the person who put them there,” but the researcher thought that at some point they would calm down and later get tired of being in this stupid room with these stupid snakes.
If they actually couldn’t get out, I think they would get bored at some point but the stress would definitely persist. Living in the snake room is an example of stress-boredom. I think a lot of techs kind of feel this way because they care deeply about saving lives and take their responsibilities very seriously, but are also relegated to doing monotonous tasks like holding pets, cleaning cages, and fetching things the vets need to do work the techs are completely capable of doing.
Financial fatigue is when you’re able to make rent by tightening your belt… over and over and over. We simply don’t pay most techs well enough to relax and have a break from worrying about making ends meet. Over time, this state of enforced frugality wears people down and I don’t blame them when they decide to do something that’s going to let them worry less about making car payments.
Finally, there’s the belief that their long-term professional future will look exactly like their professional present and past. For decades, we’ve told techs that they’re going to be better utilized, appreciated, and compensated. But how has that actually gone in most clinics?
Look, veterinary medicine has historically done a crap job of leveraging, developing, and retaining our support staff. Also, change is hard. I understand why so many clinics have developed ways of doing things over the years and now they just want to keep doing things the way they’re comfortable with. The friction of changing established practice habits often feels greater than the slow, steady drain of staff boredom and stagnation even though small, repeated changes lead to meaningful long-term improvements in patient care, employee engagement, and client service.
But the bill for that long term comfort, the ease of just doing things as they’ve been done in the past, is coming due. Part of the reason the price of veterinary care has gone up recently is because our support staff seem to be done working for peanuts. They have too many other options and the idea of tightening one’s belt over and over so a corporation can return better quarterly earnings or put a little more money into the pockets of some PE investors is simply not motivating, even to people with big hearts for pets.
The rising price of care should also be a motivator for us to finally do what we’ve been saying we need to do for the last 20 years and actually leverage our support staff. It’s possible to take work off a veterinarian’s plate, give it to a well-trained technician, stimulate that tech to feel challenged and motivated, lower the cost to the pet owner, and also make a bigger profit for the clinic. Those numbers can work!
Technicians should be increasing doctor and practice productivity by handling more client communications, delivering more services, and working more independently as collaborators to veterinarians. Doctors using AI scribes not only increase their efficiency and reduce their administrative burdens, they open up information sharing in a way that has never existed before. When complete notes exist immediately after patient interactions, support staff can be instantly knowledgeable of both patient status and therapeutic plans. They can support medical treatment strategies more autonomously, handle more client communication, and further their own development by watching cases move through the clinic with clear expectations about why decisions are being made.
The old doctor-first model of care is too slow to be affordable, and labor costs in our profession are too high to have well trained paraprofessionals standing around waiting for permission to act. We’re heading into a world where balancing efficiency with strong client relationships is going to determine success. Veterinary technicians are a big part of the answer. It’s time for us to stop losing them to boredom, financial stress, and a feeling that their career path doesn’t go anywhere. It’s time for us to embrace the future of our profession.
