5 Nov 2025
Nursing lecturer Angela Chapman urgers practices “implement burnout strategies early”.
Chris Simpson
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Image © Syda Productions / Adobe Stock
Veterinary practices have been urged to take a proactive approach to tackle workplace burnout before it develops.
Angela Chapman, senior veterinary nursing lecturer at Melbourne Polytechnic and graduate researcher at La Trobe University, delivered the talk “Healing the healers: tackling burnout in veterinary nurses” at BVNA Congress.
The RVN told practice leaders: “Implement burnout strategies early; you don’t have to wait until your team are burning out, have a look at what might be a risk factor.”.
She added: “Prevention of burnout is critical to retention, and so in order to do that, we need to increase utilisation and progression.”
Ms Chapman said burnout was caused by both quantity and quality of workload, noting the need for challenging and interesting work to keep employees engaged, and that a lack of clarity regarding regulation meant vets were often “still not delegating appropriately to their nurses”.
To that end, she recommended practices implement “stay interviews”, asking staff what they enjoy about their jobs, which tasks or responsibilities they find interesting and what changes can be made to improve their time at work or career progression.
She added: “One of the key industry-wide barriers [to addressing burnout] is cultural norms.”
Ms Chapman advocated for changing practice culture to ensure staff are encouraged to take regular breaks and go home on time.
She noted it can be seen as a “badge of honour” to work a 12-hour shift without stopping for a break, but “we need to change that attitude and that culture, because having a break is not only important for you, but it actually makes you a better nurse for your patients as well”.
The nurse urged practices to create “that culture in your team, where you kick the other people out the door when it’s the end of their shift and say, ‘no, we’re okay’”.
Ms Chapman further called for practice leaders to receive support to develop their skills, because the culture within the vet industry was often to “promote people because of their clinical expertise, we don’t promote people because they are showing excellent leadership qualities”.
To help practice staff evaluate burnout risk factors within their clinics and highlight perspective differences between team members and leadership, Ms Chapman and her colleagues are developing an anonymous vet nurse burnout prevention survey.
Said to take less than 10 minutes to fill in, the survey is set to be released before the end of the year.
Ms Chapman reiterated the importance of tackling burnout’s root causes, noting that self-care strategies can only work for individuals in the short term.
She said: “If the causes of your burnout are still there, it doesn’t really matter how well you’re looking after yourself, that stress is still going to be continuous. It’s still going to be having that impact on you, so what we need to do is address burnout at the organisational source.”
