Staff retention: double or quits?

The recruitment problem in the veterinary profession is omnipresent and as crippling as ever.

The most recent method of trying to tackle the shortage is the announcement of the University of Nottingham School of Veterinary Medicine and Science’s dual intake.

The university has opted to enrol 150 undergraduates in September – as many institutions do – but will also take on another 150 students from April 2020. However, is that going to help the momentous problem at all?

This poses an interesting conundrum.

Additional requirements

The knee-jerk reaction is negative; as with the opening of new vet schools, critics are worried the increase in student numbers will further limit the availability of EMS placements – especially as Nottingham does not have an on-site hospital and uses external clinics for final-year teaching already.

Essentially, doubling the number of students in a year group will require considerably more staff, teaching spaces and university accommodation – regardless of how intricately well planned the curriculum may be.

However, if students have different term – and therefore holiday – dates, this should largely avoid the EMS problem. It may allow those students who, for whatever reason, cannot start the academic year at the conventional time to defer starting vet school by six months rather than having to wait a full year.

Wrong focus?

Regardless of whether the two separate intakes will negatively affect student welfare and teaching in its own right, it is still not addressing the recruitment crisis directly.

The problem in the veterinary profession is retention, not lack of new graduates; opening more vet schools, or enrolling more students at existing ones, is just turning more taps on, not plugging the leak.

The retention problem is multi-faceted, as I have discussed before.

Good-quality vets are leaving the profession – be that due to poor working environments, poor rotas, compassion fatigue, increased client expectations, poor mental health, Brexit uncertainty or whatever – and we are losing them at a faster rate than we can replace them with competent, well-qualified vets.

With all the will in the world, a dewy eyed new grad does not replace a 10-year qualified vet.

Vicious cycle

It is these factors the profession must address, rather than simply focus on churning out more and more new grads who will fall into the same cycle of being unsupported due to a lack of experienced vets, lose confidence, interest or well-being, and leave or diversify as a result.

The cycle is worse than vicious: on a practice level, a vet leaves, which puts the rest of the team under pressure while the practice fails to employ a replacement; then another leaves, piling yet more pressure on everybody else. The same amount of work is distributed between fewer and fewer people until almost an entire staff changeover has occurred.

This is reflected in the profession as a whole. Practices may be forced to make a decision to stop a certain line of work (mixed practices giving up their large animal side, for example), which puts further pressure on neighbouring practices that may also be struggling.

Skeleton crew

Corporatisation is not necessarily the devil – for a start, different corporates have different business models, no one practice can be tarred with the same brush and not all independent practices are all rosy.

But I, and some of my fellow University of Glasgow graduates, have experienced the corporate squeeze first hand, with practices receiving orders from “higher up” to run on skeleton staff for a while… but that’s no good when, all of a sudden, half the vets have gone and those that are left are completely burned out.

The bottom line is retention is key – and that means staff should come first.

Staff come first

This doesn’t necessarily mean paying luxurious salaries for cushy hours; it means, first and foremost, communication – keep everyone on the same page, and try to support them as much as possible, while aiming to recruit quickly.

Avoiding a “snowball effect” is vital – if more than one vet leaves a practice in a short space of time, that snowball needs to be stopped as soon as possible.

While Nottingham’s second cohort of students is definitely a new approach, it is not going to solve the workforce issue any time soon. The responsibility lies largely with the individual practices – be that independent or corporate – to make staff retention their priority.