Dr. Laura Molgaard: Veterinary staffing shortages
SciLine conducts interviews with experts and makes the footage available to journalists for use in their stories.
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A shortage of veterinarians—along with veterinary technicians, faculty, and many types of specialists—is being reported in many locations across the country.
On February 29, 2024, SciLine interviewed: Dr. Laura Molgaard, the dean of the College of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Minnesota about veterinary staffing shortages. See the footage and transcript from the interview below, or select ‘Contents’ on the left to skip to specific questions.
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Introduction
[00:19]
LAURA MOLGAARD: My name is Dr. Laura Molgaard. I’m the Dean of the University of Minnesota College of Veterinary Medicine, and I study admissions, educational innovations, and more recently, I’ve become really interested in the workforce shortage challenges.
Interview with SciLine
What can you tell us about the current shortage of veterinarians?
[00:43]
LAURA MOLGAARD: This shortage has been building for quite a while. Although sometimes people associate it with the pandemic—which certainly exacerbated things—the increased demand for veterinary services has been building since the 1980s. When there had been the beginning of an increased number of pet-owning households and number of pets per households, as well as an increased demand for the services that had become available. There’s just been a growth in advances in medical care for pets and for animals. So, couple that with the relatively flat demand—I’m sorry, flat supply—of veterinarians, meaning that there are relatively few veterinary schools compared to medical schools and other health professions schools, you can see that that can result in a shortage of veterinarians.
What can you tell us about retention rates of veterinary medicine professionals?
[01:44]
LAURA MOLGAARD: There are also concerns about retention in the profession. That is mostly about veterinary nurses or technicians. So, veterinary technicians are the paraprofessionals who work side by side with veterinarians to help care for animals, providing support with anesthesia—providing nursing care basically. So, retention in that profession is a much bigger concern. And so, that is definitely one of the driving causes of the veterinary technician workforce shortage.
How do shortages in veterinary staffing compare across fields and locations?
[02:28]
LAURA MOLGAARD: The shortages can be experienced different ways in different regions and in different times. So, during the pandemic, we were experiencing shortages really pretty much everywhere and in every part of the profession. That was in part due to the fact that operational changes had to happen during the pandemic, for example, there was curbside care for pets, and that just wasn’t as efficient in most cases. So, there were shortages in companion animal and in large animal. There were shortages in urban areas, rural, suburban. Before and after the pandemic, though, the shortages are most acutely felt in rural areas.
What is the impact of the veterinary staffing shortage?
[03:28]
LAURA MOLGAARD: The impact of the veterinary workforce shortage is significant because veterinarians do a lot of different things to protect the health of animals and people in the environment we share. So certainly everyone, I think, can understand that having a shortage of veterinarians can put animal health at risk. So, that’s the health of pets. That’s the health of farm animals. Any animal’s health can be put at risk. But there are also many other impacts. Veterinarians are public health professionals. And when we don’t have enough veterinarians, we put the public health at risk. That could be food safety. That could be detecting zoonotic diseases—those are diseases that affect animals and people. That could be identifying foreign animal diseases, or other introduction of new diseases. Some of the things that perhaps people think less about is that there are also shortages of academic veterinarians. And in fact, the clinical faculty workforce shortage has doubled over the last 10 years. And so, if it’s harder to recruit clinical faculty, that means it’s going to be harder to train more veterinarians, which then just exacerbates the shortage.
What factors are driving rural veterinary staffing shortages in particular?
[04:53]
LAURA MOLGAARD: The rural workforce shortage is really quite complicated. In veterinary medicine, part of that complication is that the species of animals in rural areas are quite broad. There are farm animals. And that is, I think, where most people’s minds go first. And that’s critically important, of course, because agriculture, animal agriculture, is very important to the economy and to the livelihoods of farmers. So certainly, a shortage of veterinarians in rural areas, it can cause dramatic impacts to animal agriculture. But of course, people own companion animals and other animals in rural areas, too. So, there are impacts to pets. We recently heard report of a community in Minnesota that had no emergency services for companion animals within a two hour drive, which puts those pets at risk. And, of course, causes a lot of stress for families in that community.
What are some potential solutions for the shortage of veterinarians?
[06:07]
LAURA MOLGAARD: The veterinary workforce shortage is complex and so there is no silver bullet. And there are a multitude of potential solutions. And we really have to look at a multifaceted approach. So, because I’m the dean of a veterinary school, that’s where I start. And so, I start with looking at pipeline development—reaching out to young people. And we’re reaching earlier and earlier into the community and schools to get young people of all backgrounds interested in veterinary medicine. And because of the rural shortage, we make sure that we are reaching out to rural communities as well. And then through admissions, making sure that we are again reaching a broad audience and targeting particular parts of the profession, like our veterinary food, animal scholars track, and then the educational process itself, making sure that we’re providing a world-class education that prepares our veterinary graduates for all of the different unique career paths that they can serve. Whether that be practicing out in the community, in food animal, companion animal, public health, research careers, academia. And then we also focus a lot on scholarship fundraising—helping support the educational debt that students are going to be concerned about. Health professions education is by nature an expensive proposition, whether we’re talking about veterinary education or other health professions, and so scholarship fundraising is a really important part of my job. Another thing that we do is legislative advocacy for programs like rural loan forgiveness programs to help support graduates who are going to go out and serve in rural communities where the salaries are just not as high as they would be in urban areas.
What can you tell us about the mental health of veterinarians?
[08:06]
LAURA MOLGAARD: There’s been a lot of attention paid to veterinary mental health in recent years. And that’s been critically important because there were some studies about, I would say, six or seven years ago that were really shining a light on some concerning statistics about veterinary mental health. And so, since then, the profession and veterinary schools have been paying a lot of attention to some solutions and paying more attention to supporting student mental health and practitioner mental health, whether that be hiring more counselors for schools, prevention programs, employee assistance programs, workplace wellbeing programs. So that’s been critically important. More recently, the AVMA has just published some new results of a survey that shows some really promising news that we maybe have, I don’t know if we’ve turned the corner, but we have some really, I guess, exciting, positive data that’s come out that show that 75% of veterinarians say that they are satisfied with their career. The interesting part of that, though, is that while the majority of veterinarians say they’re satisfied with their careers, they are worried that their colleagues are not satisfied. So, we’re not quite sure what that means. And that’s something that needs to be studied a little bit more. But hopefully that means that some of these interventions are making a difference.
What topics would you like to see reporters covering more, with regards to vet staffing shortages?
[Posted February 29, 2024 | Download video]
