Why Do Vets Leave The Profession? Workforce Shortages And Wellbeing

Yes, and it is not evenly spread. Some practices fill a vacancy in a fortnight and others advertise the same post for most of a year. The shortages bite hardest in farm and equine work, in out of hours cover, in some rural and coastal areas, and in the official veterinarian roles that underpin food safety and export certification. The RCVS, which regulates the profession, runs periodic surveys of the veterinary workforce, and those give the most reliable picture of how people are working and what is pushing them out.

Brexit changed the supply side considerably. For years a substantial proportion of vets joining the UK register had qualified elsewhere in Europe, and they were especially well represented in public health and certification work. When free movement ended that flow slowed, just as the paperwork burden on exports grew, so demand for certifying vets rose exactly when the pool of them was shrinking. New UK vet schools have opened partly in response, and annual home grown graduate numbers are higher than a decade ago.

So the pipeline is being widened, which is the part most applicants already know. The part they usually miss is that widening the pipeline does not fix the problem on its own.

Vet school remains one of the most oversubscribed degrees in the country. Every year there are far more capable applicants than places, which is precisely why the interview process is as demanding as it is. Nobody is short of people who want to become vets.

The difficulty is what happens afterwards. A meaningful number of vets step away from clinical practice within the first several years of qualifying, and many more reduce their hours or shift into roles with more predictable days. If you keep pouring graduates into a bucket that leaks, you can pour faster and still not fill it. That is why the conversation inside the profession has moved from recruitment towards retention, and why most serious initiatives now aim at making veterinary jobs sustainable.

Leaving clinical practice is not the same as leaving the profession. Vets move into industry, government, research, teaching and charity work, and those are perfectly good uses of the degree. The concern is not that people change direction, but that some leave exhausted rather than because they found something they wanted more.

Hours are the first and most obvious reason. A consulting day meant to end at six routinely does not, because the last appointment turned out to be a collapse rather than a nail clip, and because notes, lab results and callbacks all have to happen somewhere. Add out of hours and on call, and a night of interrupted sleep can be followed by a full day of consults. Dedicated out of hours providers have taken much of that load off general practice, but it has not gone, particularly in farm and equine work.

Client conflict is the second, and the one applicants underestimate most. Vets are frequently blamed personally for prices they did not set, in a system where clients pay directly and there is no NHS behind them. I have watched kind, excellent colleagues absorb a great deal of anger about money, in the consulting room and increasingly in online reviews. Our article on why veterinary treatment is so expensive in the UK sets out where those costs come from.

Then there is moral distress, the quiet one. It is knowing exactly what the best treatment would be and being unable to provide it, because the money is not there or the owner will not consent. Doing the second best thing repeatedly wears at people in a way that dramatic cases do not. The profession now talks about contextualised care, meaning a genuine range of reasonable options rather than one gold standard plan with failure attached to everything else.

Finally, there is the shape of the people who become vets. This profession is selected almost entirely for high achievers who have never been comfortable getting things wrong, and medicine is a field where you will get things wrong. Perfectionism is a superb engine for getting into vet school and a difficult companion at two in the morning. Pay compounds it: starting salaries have improved, but set against a long degree, substantial debt and the responsibility carried from day one, the arithmetic can feel thin.

It is, and I would not respect an article that pretended otherwise. Euthanasia is the clearest example. Being able to end suffering kindly is one of the genuine privileges of this job and one of the few things we can offer that human medicine cannot. It is also true that performing it several times in a day, for devastated families, while running to time, is a real weight, and the ones which stay with you are rarely the ones you expect.

It is well documented, and now openly discussed within the profession, that veterinary work carries significant psychological pressure, and that the risk of suicide among vets has been a serious and long standing concern. I mention it because you deserve honesty and because the profession no longer avoids the subject, not to alarm you. What has genuinely changed is the silence. When I qualified, struggling was something you did not mention. Now it is discussed in practice meetings, in the professional press and at vet school.

Vetlife is the charity to know here. It is independent of the regulator and of employers, run by and for the veterinary community, and it offers confidential support including a helpline available at any hour, mental health support and financial assistance. Vets, nurses, students and support staff can all use it. If you take one concrete fact into an interview, make it that one, because naming Vetlife shows you have listened to how the profession looks after its own.

None of this is a warning off. It is an accurate description of a demanding job, and demanding jobs are done well by people who go in with their eyes open.

Quite a lot, and this is the half of the story weak interview answers leave out. New graduates now enter a structured development period supported by the RCVS, with a named adviser in practice, which is a considerable improvement on being handed the on call phone in your first fortnight and wished luck. The RCVS also runs long term work on mental health across the profession, and the BVA has pushed hard on what a good veterinary workplace looks like, covering rotas, breaks, bullying, flexible working and how practices handle abusive clients.

Working patterns have changed faster than almost anything else. Four day weeks, part time and job share posts, dedicated out of hours providers, and rotas designed so nobody routinely works a night before a full clinical day are all far more common. Employers compete on mentoring and continuing professional development as well as salary, having understood that a vet who leaves after eighteen months is expensive in every sense.

The table below sets out the main pressures, what each looks like day to day, and how the profession is responding. It is a useful shape to carry into an interview.

Yes. I would choose it again, and I say that having done the nights, had the arguments about money, and driven home from farm visits that did not go the way I wanted. I will not pretend the difficulties away, because you will meet them, and an honest answer is worth more to you than an encouraging one.

What makes it worth it is that the work is genuinely interesting and genuinely useful, most days, which very few careers manage at once. You use science properly, on real animals, with an owner in front of you and a decision that has to be made today. You get the diagnosis nobody else got. You send home a dog that arrived flat and grey. You sit with a family at the end of a very old cat's life and do the last thing well, and they thank you for it years later. The variety lasts a whole career, from general practice and farm work to referral, public health, research, government and industry.

The profession is also, in my experience, unusually decent to be part of. Colleagues help. Vets you have never met will take your call about a case. Our article on life at vet school covers the cohort you will join, which for most vets becomes a support network for the next forty years.

A very common version of this question is: how would you look after your own wellbeing as a vet? A close relative of it is: what do you think would be the hardest part of the job for you?

A strong answer sounds something like this. "I think the hardest part for me would be the emotional side of euthanasia, and the days where the right treatment is not affordable. On work experience at a small animal practice I watched a vet euthanase an elderly dog and then go straight into a routine vaccination consult, and afterwards she told me she gives herself two minutes in the prep room first, because otherwise it stacks up. That stayed with me, because it was such a small, practical thing. I would not be immune to any of it, and I think I would need habits like that."

"Practically, I would want to keep things in my life that are not veterinary. I row, and I have kept it up through A levels because it forces me outside for a few hours a week. I would want to work somewhere with proper new graduate support and someone senior I could ask questions of without feeling stupid, because asking for help early is what keeps small problems small. And I would want to know where the professional support is before I needed it. Vetlife runs a confidential helpline for the veterinary community, and I would rather already know it exists than go looking on a bad night."

That works for several reasons. It is realistic rather than naive, and claims no immunity from a pressure that affects experienced vets. It draws on something specific and observed, and the detail about two minutes in the prep room is the sort of thing you only get from standing in a practice. It names concrete strategies: interests outside the job, a support network, asking for help early, and knowing where to turn. It ends forward looking rather than trailing off into gloom. Our key tips for veterinary interview success covers this structure in more detail.

The classic mistakes are worth naming. The first is saying you love animals so much that the stress will not affect you, which tells an interviewer you have not understood the job, and it is the answer they hear most often. The second is claiming you have no weaknesses and never find anything difficult, which is not resilience but a refusal to reflect, and reflection is a professional skill they are actively assessing. The third is over correcting into bleakness until the panel wonders why you want the career at all. The answer you want sits in the middle: clear eyed about the difficulties, specific about how you would manage them, and still visibly keen.

Start with your own work experience, because that is where your best material already is. Go back through your notes and find the moments where you saw the pressure rather than the medicine: the vet who stayed late, the consult where money was the real subject, the difficult client, the euthanasia. Our vet work experience guide explains how to record placements so they are still useful months later.

Then build a little context. Know that the RCVS is the regulator and runs the workforce surveys, that the BVA is the professional body, and that Vetlife is the independent charity offering confidential support. Know that the supply of vets from Europe changed after Brexit and that retention is the deeper issue. Have one or two examples of the response. That is enough, and inventing figures is far riskier than saying the picture varies by sector.

Practise saying it out loud to someone who will push back. Prepare it alongside other hot topics such as bovine TB and the badger cull, where the skill tested is the same: hold a balanced position, acknowledge the other side, and commit to a view. Interview preparation of this kind, including mock interviews with a qualified vet, is part of The Vet Offer Programme.

Above all, be truthful. The applicants I coach who handle this best are not the ones with the most polished material. They are the ones who have genuinely thought about whether they want this career knowing what it costs, and decided that they do. That comes across in a way no rehearsal can imitate.