The cost of burnout

On this week’s episode of The Vet Blast Podcast presented by dvm360, Aaron Shaw, OTR/L, CHT, CSCS, co-host of The Resilient Vet: Mind and Body Strategies for Success, and our host Adam Christman, DVM, MBA, chat about ways veterinary clinics can help build durable veterinary teams, what clinics are getting wrong when it comes to burnout, including how much burnout can actually cost a veterinary clinic. In this Q&A below, Christman and Shaw explore the actually monetary cost burnout can have on a clinic, and what about injury and burnout teams are getting wrong.

Adam Christman, DVM, MBA: Okay, so you spent quite a few decades, 3 decades, my goodness, working in injury prevention performance and now in [the] veterinary medicine space. So from your lens and your perspective, what are clinics still getting wrong about burnout and injury and overall team well being?

Aaron Shaw, OTR/L, CHT, CSCS: Good question. So I think that the first of all, shout out to my wife, Kristin, who really encouraged me for a couple of years to kind of focus on this industry, because there were some needs that my skill set kind of matched up pretty well with. The more I've done research over the past couple of years, specifically in the vet med, what I see is a focus on kind of the band aid approach, the ‘here's the wellness seminar, here's the PDF on how to, don't forget to, sleep well and take care of yourself and go for a walk.’

And none of these things are incorrect. But I think what's missing is really a systems approach. So instead of really treating it as a resilience problem, it is an entire system or culture, if you will, that needs some attention. So, yes, continue to focus on the individual and encouraging all of the health and wellness things that we should be doing, but success has to come from weaving that into a culture and a system and SOPs in a practice.

I can even relate this to people outside of vet med that it's not really a lack of knowledge, it's a lack of implementing things. So I think over my 3 decade career, what we know about health and wellness and fitness and injury prevention [has] only grown much greater today than was 30 years ago. And yet, despite having that information, generally speaking, we are less healthy as a population, than we've ever been. So it's not all information, it's how do we implement and that's where systems need to be really baked in there.

Christman: What about some numbers? Are there some real numbers to this problem? What are the like actual costs of turnover and chronic stress in a clinic?

Shaw: Yes, there [are} some pretty good studies out there. It's actually a great article, “The Economic Cost of Burnout in Veterinary Medicine.”¹ So there are dollar figures. And of course, every clinic is our hospital be a little bit different, but I've seen numbers that put losing a vet tech at around $59,000. So one vet technician, so you're talking the cost of trying to rehire, loss of productivity, not to mention the added burden. I think anybody who's listening can probably relate to that time when they're either short staffed because somebody left or somebody else is sick, and it's a pressure cooker for everybody, and there's a financial cost related to that. And then when you talk about the doctors leaving, there's some studies that will show that to replace a doctor is 1-2 times their salary, again, lost productivity and so on. So you could be talking hundreds of 1000s of dollars directly related to burnout and stress in the clinic, and then there's this whole other part of it that's really harder to pinpoint, but people showing up and not being able to give their A game—not that everybody can give an A game every single day, but if they're just on that threat of burnout and pressure and kind of contemplating leaving; leaving the career, leaving their job. I mean, there are consequences to that, and it's not fair to think that people can be capable of doing their best work.

So I would say that the costs are very much financial, which is hard because it's not really, typically, it's not a line item on somebody's budget, on like the dollar for burnout. So it is financial, but I would also say that just to have a heart and say, even without the financial numbers, we're dealing with human beings, human beings that deserve to feel safe and deserve to be in a place where they can do their best work, and the system is set up for them to do their best work. And those costs are real, so it's both human cost and literally dollars and cents.

Want to hear more of the conversation? Check out the full episode here, or wherever you listen to podcasts!

Reference

Neill CL, Hansen CR, Salois M. The Economic Cost of Burnout in Veterinary Medicine. Front Vet Sci. 2022;9:814104. doi: 10.3389/fvets.2022.814104.