If you manage a veterinary practice, you've probably felt it for a while: the traditional model of work in vet med is quietly disappearing. Now the data backs it up.

Instinct Science, in partnership with UserEvidence, recently surveyed 959 veterinary professionals across general practice, specialty, emergency, and urgent care. The headline finding, reported in Today's Veterinary Business by Instinct founder and CEO Caleb Frankel, VMD, is striking: only 10% of practices have veterinarians working full-time.

Flexibility isn't a perk anymore. It's the baseline.

Part-time roles, four-day workweeks, and alternative scheduling have moved from "nice to have" to standard practice, and survey respondents identified them as a major key to keeping their teams. That matches what we see every day on Hound, where demand for relief work, part-time roles, and flexible schedules keeps climbing.

The catch? Staffing is also the biggest barrier to offering that flexibility. In general practice, 60% of respondents said staffing shortages keep them from offering more flexible schedules. In emergency and specialty medicine, 85% named staffing as their top challenge.

In other words: flexibility helps you keep people, but you need people to offer flexibility. Practices that crack this loop first will have a real hiring advantage.

Hiring alone isn't closing the gap

In specialty and emergency settings, more than half of practices hired additional full-time staff last year, yet nearly a third still reported working more hours. Caseload volume and complexity are growing faster than staffing models can keep up.

The survey's takeaway is one we'd echo: hiring more people is necessary, but it isn't sufficient. The work itself has to be rethought: how schedules are built, how tasks are distributed across the team, and where technology can take friction out of the day. Nearly half of general practices now use AI in some capacity, and 91% adopted or changed at least one technology system in the past year.

A genuinely hopeful signal

Buried in the data is some of the best news vet med has had in a while: reported stress, compassion fatigue, and mental health challenges have declined from their 2023 peak. The interventions practices have been making (better scheduling, more intentional team support, workflow improvements) appear to be working.

That's worth pausing on. The wellbeing crisis in veterinary medicine is not fixed, but the needle is moving, and it's moving because practices changed how they treat their people.

What this means for your practice

  • Build flexibility into roles before candidates ask for it. Only 10% of practices have full-time vets; job seekers are comparing you against schedules, not just salaries.
  • Audit how work flows, not just headcount. If your team is growing but hours aren't shrinking, the bottleneck is the model, not the people.
  • Keep investing in the retention basics. The drop in burnout since 2023 shows this stuff compounds.

At Hound, we see thousands of veterinary professionals tell us what they want from work, and flexibility, fit, and feeling valued top the list every time. The practices winning on hiring are the ones already built for how vet med wants to work next.

Source: Veterinary Industry Survey: Staffing, Burnout, and AI Adoption, Caleb Frankel, VMD, Today's Veterinary Business, May 12, 2026.

Ready to build a team for how vet med works now?

Flexible schedules, relief coverage, transparent pay: the practices winning on hiring lead with all three. Post a job on Hound and get matched with veterinary professionals looking for exactly what you offer.