Protect your teams with the only well-being assessment validated by Mayo Clinic and built for the realities of veterinary practice — moral injury, compassion fatigue, euthanasia decisions, client conflict, and debt load. Designed for the whole team: DVMs, technicians, nurses, support staff, researchers, faculty, and specialty practitioners.
Distress across the team, last 6 quarters
Veterinary leaders name staff retention as their top strategic challenge year after year — and behind every exit is a measurable wave of burnout, compassion fatigue, and moral injury. The cost is no longer abstract.
Veterinary technician turnover sits around 22% — twice the rate of registered nurses and among the highest of any healthcare profession.
Burnout-driven veterinary technician turnover costs the median practice an estimated $59,000 per year in recruitment, lost productivity, and training drag.
One in three veterinary professionals have seriously considered leaving the profession, citing burnout and moral distress as primary drivers.
Female veterinarians die by suicide at 2.4× the general-population rate; male veterinarians at 1.6×. Veterinary technicians range from 2.3× to 5.0×.
The AVMA and recent industry workforce reporting consistently identify staff retention as the dominant concern facing veterinary leadership. DVM turnover runs roughly twice the rate of MDs in private practice. Veterinary technician turnover is among the highest in healthcare. Replacement costs cascade through every line of the practice — recruiting, training, lost productivity, and the slow erosion of team morale. The Well-Being Index gives leaders a clinical, repeated read on distress before it becomes attrition.
The CDC's analysis of U.S. veterinarian mortality from 1979–2015 (published in JAVMA, 2019) found dramatically elevated suicide rates across veterinarians and veterinary technicians. Most practices still track only what they can see — turnover, leave requests, exit interviews. The Well-Being Index measures suicidal ideation risk anonymously, as one of six clinical dimensions — giving leaders visibility into the signal their teams need them to see.
See exactly where your practice stands. Talk through your team's well-being data with a Well-Being Index expert.
Talk to a Well-Being Index ExpertMost veterinary leaders already do something for well-being — an EAP, a CE day, a wellness committee. The problem isn't intent. It's that none of it is anchored in clinical data, so no one can tell what worked, who's still at risk, or how to make the case for more.
Burnout in U.S. veterinary medicine now costs an estimated $1 billion per year for veterinarians alone — and roughly another $1 billion for veterinary technicians.Volk, Schimmack, Strand, Lord & Siren "The Economic Cost of Burnout in Veterinary Medicine," Frontiers in Veterinary Science, 2022
Four steps from licensing to insight. No software to install, no identifiable data to manage. Clean enough for a single clinic, structured enough for a hospital network or association.
Tell us the units you care about — location, role, shift, region. We configure the tenant, set your first window, and enforce anonymity at the segment level.
Choose the groups you're measuring. We deliver private invitation links. Nine questions, under a minute, anonymous by architecture. You see participation rates, not respondents.
The Spring window is open through May 21. Nine clinically validated questions. Your individual answers are never visible to anyone at Willow Creek — only the aggregate.
Take the Assessment →Your dashboard plots the team across the distress-to-thriving continuum by anonymous segment, against national benchmarks. See where risk concentrates — and which distress dimensions are driving it.
Re-run quarterly or semi-annually. The journey view shows whether your peer-debrief, shift restructure, or new benefit moved the curve — by segment, by dimension, in numbers your board will accept.
Burnout is one dimension among many. The Well-Being Index captures the full clinical picture validated by Mayo Clinic — the dimensions that actually predict turnover, errors, and harm in veterinary teams.
Whether veterinary professionals experience their work as purposeful service to animals and clients or as a shift to be endured. A leading indicator of engagement, retention, and long-tenure career trajectories.
Emotional exhaustion and depersonalization — the specific syndromes that correlate with turnover intent, client-complaint risk, and degradation of clinical judgment under pressure.
Beyond ordinary tiredness — the depleted state that compromises decision-making in euthanasia consultations, surgical safety margins, and after-hours emergency response.
The dimension early-career veterinarians and technicians weigh hardest against their student debt and career path. Strongly linked to year-2 and year-5 attrition.
Mental and physical quality of life, measured against national norms — the dimension that catches compassion fatigue, moral residue, and chronic distress before they become a leave-of-absence.
The only survey measuring this dimension in a profession with 1.6×–2.4× elevated suicide rates. Measured anonymously, surfaced at the cohort level only, with crisis-resource pathways built in.
The stakes in veterinary medicine require more than a vendor's reliability claim. The Well-Being Index was developed by Mayo Clinic researchers across more than a decade of peer-reviewed work, with approximately one million assessments now completed across leading healthcare organizations.
The Well-Being Index for Veterinary Professionals supports the full set of occupations represented in the field — clinical, support, academic, public, industry, specialty, and allied. Use it for a single clinic, a multi-site hospital network, a state association, or an entire academic program.
From a single clinic to a multi-site hospital network, a state or national association, or an academic veterinary program — the Well-Being Index for Veterinary Professionals is licensed and deployed by the leaders who own the wellness mandate in each setting.
Quantify the people side of your hospital, anchor retention in clinical evidence, and bring the board a metric beyond turnover-after-the-fact.
Replace anecdotal wellness reporting with validated clinical data. Target interventions where the risk actually lives. Prove ROI to leadership.
A validated, member-benefit-grade standard for measuring well-being across your member organizations. Aggregate the largest dataset in the profession; turn it into policy, advocacy, and CE programming.
Measure well-being across DVM students, interns, and residents in the same validated framework used in graduate-medical-education research. Identify where training-environment distress concentrates — and intervene before attrition.
Engagement and culture surveys weren't designed to measure clinical distress in a stigma-heavy profession. They miss exactly the dimensions that predict turnover, errors, and harm in veterinary teams.
| Feature | Well-Being Index | Engagement / Pulse Survey |
|---|---|---|
| Time to complete | 60 sec · 9 questions | 15–40 min · 40–80+ questions |
| What it measures | Clinical distress across 6 dimensions | Sentiment, morale, engagement |
| Predictive of turnover, errors, suicidal ideation | Yes — peer-reviewed | Not designed for it |
| National veterinary benchmarks | Yes — anchored in Well-Being Index U.S.-worker norms | Varies / unavailable |
| Anonymity guarantee | 100% — architectural, not policy | Varies; often demographic-traceable |
| Standards & recognition alignment | AVMA · AAHA · AAVMC · NAVTA wellness frameworks | Rarely referenced |
| Designed for repeated measurement | Yes — quarterly cadence | Survey fatigue limits cadence |
| Validated by independent research | Peer-reviewed · Mayo Clinic | Vendor claims |
The Well-Being Index for Veterinary Professionals fits inside the wellness commitments and accreditation expectations your practice or association has already made — making it easier to budget, justify, and report on.
The AVMA and Merck Animal Health's joint Veterinary Wellbeing Studies have made clinical-grade measurement a profession-wide priority. The Well-Being Index is the mechanism for actually doing it inside your organization.
Hospital accreditation bodies and practice-management associations increasingly recognize team well-being as a driver of quality of care. Validated baseline data positions your hospital alongside the standards leaders are adopting.
Veterinary colleges and post-graduate training programs operate in a learner-distress environment that closely mirrors graduate medical education — where the Well-Being Index has been widely adopted to measure trainee well-being.
The questions we hear from practice owners, HR leaders, and association directors — and the short answers.
Yes. The fastest path is to tour a live demo dashboard with placeholder but realistic veterinary data — you'll see exactly what your leadership view would look like the first time you run an assessment. From there, most organizations run a 30-minute consultation to map the deployment to their structure (single clinic, multi-site, association, or academic program).
By architecture, not policy. Individual scores are never accessible to anyone at your organization, full stop. Anonymous segments (role, location, shift, tenure) are only displayed once participation thresholds are met — small groups roll up to larger ones until the threshold clears. This is the same anonymity architecture used in physician and first-responder deployments.
The 9-item Well-Being Index was independently validated on a sample of 5,392 U.S. workers across professions (Dyrbye, Satele & Shanafelt, JOEM, 2016). That sample's professional breadth is exactly why it covers the full range of veterinary occupations — clinical, support, academic, public, industry, and specialty. The veterinary configuration anchors thresholds to that validation envelope while contextualizing language and benchmarks for the profession.
Anyone. The most common deployments include veterinarians, technicians, nurses, assistants, kennel staff, client-service representatives, practice managers, hospital administrators, and leadership. Specialty deployments add researchers, academic faculty, residents, interns, public-health veterinarians, and industry roles. See the Who It's For section above for the full list.
No. The Well-Being Index runs as a hosted platform. Your team takes the assessment on any device via a private link. Leaders log into a web dashboard. SSO and roster integration are available for multi-site organizations and associations.
Most deployments — from single practices to multi-site networks and state associations — are live in 2–4 weeks, depending on roster integration and segment configuration. Academic deployments line up with semester or rotation calendars.
Pricing is per organization, scaled to the population being measured. A single small clinic is in a different tier than a 40-doctor multi-site hospital or a state association. The 30-minute consultation includes a custom quote based on your structure and goals.
Yes — this is one of the strongest use cases. Associations license the Well-Being Index to offer member organizations a validated, anonymous well-being measure, then aggregate the de-identified data to inform advocacy, CE programming, and policy work. Veterinary associations and member networks have full access to the same architecture and benchmarking corpus used across leading professional deployments.
The Well-Being Index is already widely used in graduate medical education (the learner-distress problem in DVM training is structurally similar). Deans, program directors, and student affairs offices use it to measure student, intern, and resident well-being across the training arc — anonymously, and in the same validated framework used in published medical-education literature.
The two are complementary, not redundant. Engagement surveys measure how your team feels about work. The Well-Being Index measures clinical distress — burnout, fatigue, meaning, quality of life, suicidal ideation — the dimensions engagement tools weren't designed to capture and which actually predict who is going to leave, make an error, or be in crisis.
The next technician you lose, the next colleague in crisis, the next early-career exit — they're already names in your team. Pick the path that fits where you are — and see for yourself. No credit card, no procurement commitment, no software install.
A short, narrated walkthrough of the assessment, the dashboard, and what your leadership view looks like the first time you run it.
Watch the tour → Instant access · most popularFree, instant access to a demo environment loaded with realistic veterinary data. Click around. See the continuum, the segments, the journey view.
Open the demo → 30 minutesA live walkthrough with your team. We map the deployment to your practice, hospital, or association structure — and build a custom ROI model around turnover, time-off, and recruitment.
Book a consultation →Let's have a conversation about your well-being goals and needs and how the Well-Being Index can help.
Get the data, support, and strategies you need with the leading well-being solution for veterinary organizations.
Book this call with a Well-Being Index Expert if…
Tell us where to send your access and you'll be taken straight into a live demo environment—dashboards, segments, and aggregate reports loaded with realistic data to click through at your own pace.