Veterinary Medicine Has a Retention Problem. Some Employers Are Starting to Build Around It.

The veterinary profession loses roughly one in four of its team members every year. According to the American Animal Hospital Association's 2024 retention study, the average annual turnover rate among veterinary team members is approximately 23 percent and climbing. The study also found that career development ranks among the top three factors most likely to reduce attrition, alongside compensation and feeling appreciated at work.

That data point is driving a growing number of employers to rethink what a veterinary career path actually looks like, and whether the profession has historically offered enough of one.

IndeVets, a veterinary staffing and support company, announced that it has promoted five of its Associate IndeVets to a newly created Senior Associate IndeVet role, expanding its clinical leadership team from 13 to 18 veterinarians. The move is notable less for the specific promotions and more for what the role itself represents: a structured, clinician-facing career tier that did not exist before and that keeps doctors in clinical practice rather than pulling them out of it into administration.

WHAT THE ROLE ACTUALLY INVOLVES

Senior Associate IndeVets are full-time, salaried clinicians. They continue working primarily in partner hospitals. A portion of their time shifts toward leadership responsibilities, specifically onboarding and mentoring newer Associate IndeVets, conducting medical record reviews, shadowing clinicians who need support, contributing to leadership training, and building local community within the IndeVets network.

The distinction worth noting is that this is not a promotion out of clinical practice. It is a promotion within it. The five veterinarians who moved into these roles did not give up patient care to become managers. They took on peer support and mentorship responsibilities while continuing to practice, which is a model that addresses one of the more common complaints among experienced clinicians: that advancement in veterinary medicine almost always means leaving the work that drew you to the profession in the first place.

Advancement in veterinary medicine has historically meant leaving clinical practice. This model bets on a different structure: leadership within the exam room, not above it.

WHO WAS PROMOTED

The five veterinarians promoted to Senior Associate IndeVet are Dani Cimino, DVM, in Boston; Kristen Dewey, DVM, in Raleigh; Erin Hoff, DVM, in Minneapolis; Ling Iem, DVM, in Atlanta; and Sruti Sreerama, DVM, in Philadelphia. All five completed a year-long Foundations of Leadership program and the IndeVets General Practice Certificate before being eligible to apply. Selection involved a comprehensive application process assessed against clinical performance and professional standing standards.

Kristen Dewey offered a candid reflection on what the role means from the inside. "IndeVets has genuinely changed my life and renewed my faith in veterinary medicine as a career I could sustain," she said. "Now I get to help others find and fulfill their passion and purpose within this profession."

That language, renewed faith in veterinary medicine as a sustainable career, is worth sitting with. It is not language most people use about an employer unless something real shifted. It is also the kind of language that the retention data predicts: when clinicians feel supported and see a future for themselves, they stay. When they do not, the 23 percent figure is what you get.

THE BROADER CONTEXT

IndeVets is not alone in grappling with this. Retention is one of the defining operational challenges across veterinary medicine right now, for corporate groups, independent practices, specialty hospitals, and staffing companies alike. The AAHA data is consistent with what most practice managers and medical directors are seeing on the ground: experienced clinicians are leaving, newer graduates are burning out faster than expected, and the pipeline of incoming talent is not replacing what is being lost at the rate the profession needs.

The structural response to that problem varies by employer. Some have focused on compensation adjustments. Others on schedule flexibility and reduced on-call burden. The IndeVets approach, creating a formal mid-career tier that offers leadership, mentorship responsibility, and community without requiring a departure from clinical medicine, is a different bet. It is a bet that what experienced veterinarians actually want is not just more money or more time off, but a professional identity that keeps growing.

Whether that bet pays off at scale is something the profession will be watching. The AAHA retention study's finding that career development ranks with compensation as a top driver of retention suggests the logic is sound. The harder question is whether the structure can be replicated in practice settings that do not have IndeVets' staffing model behind it.

When clinicians feel supported and see a future for themselves, they stay. The 23 percent annual turnover figure is what happens when they do not.

More information on IndeVets and the Senior Associate IndeVet role is available at indevets.com.

Source: IndeVets announcement, May 2025 | AAHA 2024 Retention Study: Stay, Please | Reporting by Vet Candy | myvetcandy.com