The hidden cost of vet staff turnover (and what to do about it)

Ask a practice manager what it costs to replace a vet nurse. They'll probably say: agency fees, job advert costs, or the hours spent screening CVs.

And that's a good answer. But it does miss the costs that aren't so easy to spot. Like locum cover, lost productivity, complaints and missed revenue. But the cost that surprised me most was the pressure on the rest of the team and the client disruption. Having worked both sides of this, as a practice owner and as a locum, I was struck by how hard it is as a locum to generate estimates and bookings and understand the flows within a clinic. That knowledge lives in the permanent team, and when they are stretched or unfamiliar, it simply does not happen at the same rate.

When a vet leaves, the problem is bigger. A vet's diary has to be covered by colleagues working longer days or a locum vet, whose day rate is well above a nurse's. The practice manager running recruitment and rota cover is also still managing HR, scheduling and training. None of that workload goes away. It stacks up.

And then there is the cost that cannot be measured: client trust. Some clients will wait for their regular vet to come back. Some will not.

Why people leave

The 2024 RCVS Survey of the Professions found that vets and nurses were generally happy with their clinical work but were not happy with their salary, and nurses in particular were not happy with the support from their line manager. Pay matters. But career progression, workload and management quality come up more consistently across the research as reasons for leaving.

A 2026 study in Veterinary Record looked at psychological safety and found a direct link between whether staff felt safe raising concerns and whether they planned to stay. That is not about pay. It is about whether a nurse can say "I made a mistake" in a team meeting without it going badly for her.

The signs usually come before the resignation letter. In my own practice the early warning signs were someone isolating from the team, a change in their usual behaviour, less pride in their work, more clock-watching. What I wish I had understood sooner is whether the situation could actually be resolved. A half-committed staff member is a drain on the whole team. I would have drawn a line earlier, one way or the other.

A pay rise might keep someone for another year. It does not fix why they started looking.

What actually helps

Four things come up repeatedly in the research.

Career development, or the lack of it, is the biggest driver of nurses leaving. It does not need a formal promotion structure. It needs a conversation, once a year or so, about where someone's skills could go next. A lead role. A clinical interest area. More say over their own caseload. The absence of that conversation says something, and people read it correctly.

It is worth being honest about the limits here too. In a small practice, there might be one head nurse role and it might not be vacant for years. The conversation is still worth having, because it shows the person they are seen. But it may need to be about development rather than promotion.

Rota fairness is the second. Uneven workloads rarely happen by design. They accumulate through small scheduling decisions until one or two people are consistently taking the difficult shifts and the late finishes. Building rotas that work for your veterinary team covers this in detail. One practical change: giving the team more say in the rota itself tends to improve both the fairness and the buy-in.

Third is management. The RCVS data on line manager support and the Veterinary Record psychological safety findings are pointing at the same thing from different directions. A nurse who does not feel safe telling a manager when something went wrong is also unlikely to feel safe saying she is thinking of leaving before she has decided to. How to reduce vet burnout: what practice owners can actually do goes into more depth on the conditions that drive this.

Fourth is hiring. Turnover often starts at the point of hire, when a practice fills a vacancy quickly with whoever is available rather than whoever fits. Staff recruitment in veterinary practice: what distinguishes the practices that keep their team looks at what separates practices that keep people from those that are always rehiring.

The conversation that usually gets skipped

Most practices do exit interviews. Very few have the same conversation while someone is still there and still deciding.

The useful version is not a wellbeing check-in. It is specific. Where do you see this role going? What is getting in the way of doing your job well? Is there anything that would make you think about leaving if it did not change? Asked early enough, those questions surface problems while there is still time to fix them. Asked at the exit interview, they surface the same problems too late.

The point is not to turn every one-to-one into something uncomfortable. It is to make the hard conversation possible before resignation becomes the easiest option.

One question I would suggest asking each person on the team: what is one thing that made you think about work outside of hours this month, good or bad? The people you are about to lose have usually stopped mentioning the good ones long before they hand in their notice.

The numbers case

A practice that loses two nurses in a year is absorbing recruitment costs, locum cover, lost revenue and management time. Added together, that could have paid for the retention work several times over.

The practice manager who needs time for development conversations, rota checks and early one-to-ones is the same person managing the admin load every day. Less admin means more capacity for the things that actually reduce turnover.

Retention is not a software problem. It is a management time problem. But a practice drowning in admin has less of that time to spend.

To see how Lupa OS can reduce the admin burden, book a demo.