The Veterinary Shortage Is Real. Indiana Just Built Something That Actually Helps.

The veterinary shortage conversation has been happening for years.

It shows up in conference panels. In workforce studies. In the anxious group chats of new graduates trying to figure out where the profession is headed. It shows up in the waiting rooms of small animal clinics running three weeks out for appointments and in the increasingly desperate calls of livestock producers who cannot find a large animal vet willing to add new clients. It is a real problem, it is documented, and for the most part the response from the broader system has been to acknowledge it thoroughly and fix it incrementally.

Indiana just did something different.

The Indiana State Board of Animal Health surveyed its veterinarians, found something surprising in the data, and built a free tool to address what they found. The tool is already live. Over 300 practices have opted in. And it costs nobody, not the veterinarians, not the animal owners, a single dollar to use.

It is called Find a Vet. And the story of how it got built is worth understanding.

What the Survey Actually Found

Denise Derrer Spears with the Indiana State Board of Animal Health describes the origin of Find a Vet with the kind of clarity that comes from someone who looked at a problem directly and refused to accept a vague answer.

"We did a survey of a group of veterinarians, and a quarter of them said they've got capacity to see large animal clients. And when you get into small animals, more than a third of them said that they have capacity."

Read those numbers again. A quarter of large animal practitioners in Indiana have room for new clients right now. More than a third of small animal practitioners have capacity. At the same time, pet owners across the state are struggling to find a clinic that will take them. Livestock producers are watching animal agriculture in Indiana grow while the supply of accessible veterinary care fails to keep obvious pace.

The shortage is real. But part of what looks like a shortage is actually something else: a matching problem. The vets with capacity and the clients who need them are not finding each other. And until someone built infrastructure to connect them, there was no reason to expect that would change on its own.

That is where Find a Vet came from.

What the Tool Does

Find a Vet is a searchable directory of Indiana veterinary practices that allows animal owners to filter by species, location, specialty, and care delivery model — whether that is in-clinic, on-site farm visits, or haul-in facility services. It is hosted on the Indiana State Board of Animal Health website and the Indiana Board of Veterinary Medicine website, accessible from the home page of both.

The participation model is worth noting. Veterinarians do not pay to be listed. There is no fee for animal owners to search. Participation is entirely voluntary — and the voluntary uptake has been striking. More than 200 practices opted in during the first wave. When those practitioners saw the finished product, demand for a second wave followed immediately. The directory now includes over 300 practices and is still growing.

That kind of organic adoption from a profession that is busy, skeptical of administrative burden, and not easily moved by top-down initiatives is a signal. It suggests the tool is solving a real problem that practitioners themselves recognize.

Why This Matters Beyond Indiana

Indiana is not unique in the dynamics driving this problem. Animal agriculture is growing in states across the country. Pet ownership surged during and after the pandemic and has not receded. The pressure on both large and small animal veterinary services is a national phenomenon, not a regional one.

What is unique is the response.

Most state-level veterinary workforce initiatives produce reports. Indiana produced a searchable tool that is live and functional and already connecting animal owners with available practitioners. That is a meaningful distinction. Reports describe problems. Tools solve them.

The Find a Vet model is straightforwardly replicable. A survey of practitioners to identify capacity. A voluntary opt-in directory with practical search filters. Free access for everyone. No fees, no bureaucratic friction, no barrier between the animal owner who needs care and the practice that has room to provide it.

For veterinary associations, state boards, and workforce advocates in other states watching the access crisis worsen: this is what a practical, low-cost, high-impact intervention looks like. Indiana built it. It works. The blueprint is right there.

The Bigger Picture

The veterinary shortage is not going to be solved by a single directory tool. The pipeline issues, the educational debt burden, the geographic distribution problems, the compensation pressures that push graduates toward specialties and away from food animal practice — all of that is real and all of it requires sustained, systemic work that goes well beyond a website feature.

But the matching problem is solvable right now. Today. With the practitioners who already have capacity and the animal owners who cannot find them. And solving the part of the problem that is solvable immediately is not a distraction from the harder work. It is what good public veterinary infrastructure looks like while the harder work gets done.

Spears put the goal simply: "Help bridge the gap between growing demand and available care, ensuring both livestock producers and pet owners can access the veterinary services they need."

That is the job. Indiana found a way to start doing it.

Indiana animal owners can access the Find a Vet search tool at the Indiana State Board of Animal Health website or the Indiana Board of Veterinary Medicine website.

Clickbait Title Options:

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• A Third of Indiana's Small Animal Vets Have Capacity Right Now. Nobody Could Find Them. Until Now.

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• The Veterinary Access Crisis Has a Matching Problem. This State Just Solved It.

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• While Everyone Else Talks About the Vet Shortage, Indiana Did Something About It.