Healthy boundaries are prudent to preserving relationships, coping with stress, and preventing burnout. Setting boundaries can feel uncomfortable and intimidating for veterinary professionals who are often people pleasers used to prioritizing others’ needs before their own.

Veterinary professionals often take work home by completing medical records on the couch, talking about the day’s events with a partner, or ruminating on a case while lying in bed. These activities can impede a sense of work-life separation, resulting in compassion fatigue or burnout.

Disagreements between co-workers are inevitable due to differences in knowledge, experience, and opinion. When co-workers experience conflict over how to manage a case or which applicant to hire, avoiding the argument or ignoring the issue can erode morale and create toxicity.

Mindfulness is a mental state attained by focusing on the present and acknowledging and accepting any thoughts, feelings, or bodily sensations that come up without judgment or reactivity. Research demonstrates a wide array of physical and mental health benefits when practising mindfulness, which can be done using breathing exercises, meditation, body scans, or other grounding techniques.

Mistakes are inevitable in veterinary practice, because we are human. Sometimes mistakes are made that do not reach the patient (near-miss) or they reach the patient but do not cause harm (harmless hit). Other times an error causes harm to the patient resulting in an adverse event. Test your knowledge regarding the impact of adverse events on the well-being of veterinarians.

The last two years have been exceptionally challenging for veterinary team members. After working tirelessly throughout these trying times, it’s normal to feel overwhelmed, anxious and exhausted. To help calm your mind and manage your emotions, we invite you to participate in a 30-Day Mindfulness Challenge, guided by CommuniVET™’s veterinary wellness advocate Dr. Marie Holowaychuk. A month dedicated to staying mindful Sign up on our private Facebook group where information, advice, and...

With springtime comes the urge for many to tidy up, deep clean, or purge unused items. Research suggests that there are mental and physical health benefits to this clutter-clearing impulse. Test your knowledge regarding the impact of environmental clutter on mental health and wellbeing.

The terms burnout and compassion fatigue are often used interchangeably. And while they are both severe syndromes that can occur among veterinary team members, they have different causes and consequences.

A large proportion of veterinary team members have trait perfectionism, which causes them to set unrealistically high standards and avoid making mistakes at all costs. Self-compassion is a powerful antidote to the psychological consequences of perfectionism.