Concerns around capacity and retention in the veterinary profession are not new. However recent events such as Brexit and COVID-19 have pushed the profession to crisis point. There’s a shortage of vets, and that’s not helping the provision of good veterinary care. Especially in the food sector, but also in companion animal practice.

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The impact of COVID-19

Lockdowns and a new era of stay-at-home working brought with it a huge surge in pet ownership. The organisation UK Pet Food reported around 3.2 million households acquiring a pet since the pandemic, and the charity Cats Protection found there had been an increase of around 600,000 owned cats since 2020. This inevitably led to an increased demand for vets; at a time when many veterinary practices were operating under skeleton staff conditions, with team members absent to self-isolate or to undertake additional childcare duties.

The pandemic also brought about a rise in client frustrations. 6 in 10 vets reported in 2021 that they had felt intimidated by client’s language or behaviour over the past year. A cost-of-living crisis has stretched that relationship even further.

Let’s look at it this way. You’re doing the work of more than one person, and you’re getting in the neck from those you’re doing your best to help. Wouldn’t you consider throwing in the towel at that stage? Plenty of vets and vet nurses did, as numbers leaving clinical practice grew markedly post-2020.

The impact of Brexit

The UK veterinary profession is highly reliant on EU vets. In 2018 over half (53%) of new vets to the UK register were EU-qualified. But in 2021 this was true of less than a quarter (23%). It’s likely COVID travel restrictions contributed to this decline. But Brexit also brought about an increased demand for vets for Export Health Certification. Applications for food-related export health certificates (products of animal origin and livestock) surged by 1255% from 2020 to the end of 2021, according to Animal and Plant Health Agency (APHA). Many EU vets have traditionally been employed within the public health and food safety industry, as these roles fit more easily when learning English as a second language. A decline in this subset of the veterinary workforce has had a knock-on impact on staffing levels across all sectors of the veterinary profession.  

What can be done?

For the sake of animal welfare alone, long-term solutions are needed to solve the veterinary workforce shortage.

Significant work has been done in recent years to understand and address capacity issues. The Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons (RCVS) formed a workforce summit in 2021 with key profession stakeholders and followed this up in 2023 with a series of workshops exploring some of the topics in more detail. 

The last government was concerned enough to introduce measures to boost the profession, including modifying language testing requirements, introducing a new certification support officer role to work under the direction of Official Veterinarians, opening new vet schools and increasing the intake of the existing vet schools.  

But it remains to be seen as to whether this will plug the leaky bucket and compensate for the increasing numbers of vets leaving the profession as workload pressures continue.