A veterinary workforce crisis is becoming difficult to frame as a shortage of veterinarians alone. Veterinary practices often depend on a much larger clinical workforce, yet the people supporting diagnosis, anesthesia, surgery, and day-to-day patient care tend to have far less influence over the profession’s rules than their responsibilities might suggest. The American Veterinary Medical Association’s 2024 data illustrates the scale of that dependence: companion-animal practices reported an average of about 6.35 veterinary technicians and assistants for every 2.6 veterinarians.
The imbalance can become ever more consequential at the regulatory level. Current data from the NAVTA reports that veterinary technicians are regulated in 41 U.S. jurisdictions, while 12 jurisdictions use voluntary credentials that have limited title protection, and 13 do not regulate the profession at all.
Representation of those regulatory bodies is another question entirely. Veterinary technicians may carry professional credentials and substantial clinical responsibility while having limited influence over the policies governing their scope, compensation, and advancement.
The economics of the profession sharpen the problem. A veterinary technician can spend years acquiring specialist knowledge while remaining structurally dependent on a veterinarian employer for opportunities that other healthcare professionals may regard as ordinary career progression. Ownership is another fault line.
Ashli Selke, a Registered Veterinary Technician, neurodivergent, and founder of VIBE Vet, points to state laws that restrict veterinary technicians from owning an interest in veterinary hospitals even though non-veterinarians may be permitted to do so. She argues that such restrictions can leave experienced technicians with fewer avenues to turn professional expertise into leadership or economic mobility.
The human cost deserves equal scrutiny. A 2019 NIOSH study of U.S. veterinary professionals found that male veterinary technicians and technologists had a higher suicide mortality than that of the general population, while the figure for female technicians and technologists was 2.3 times higher. The researchers cautioned that the estimate for male technicians was based on fewer than 20 deaths, but the findings nevertheless identified veterinary technicians as a group requiring distinct suicide-prevention strategies. Earlier research involving more than 11,000 U.S. veterinarians also found that 9% reported current serious psychological distress and 17% had experienced suicidal ideation since leaving veterinary school.
Selke, RVT, CVT, has spent much of her career inside the rooms where these decisions are made. A former president of the National Association of Veterinary Technicians in America, and founder of NAVTA’s Government Relations Committee, Selke has worked across regulation and professional advocacy. She has completed her Bachelor’s in Legal Support and Services and is currently completing her Master of Legal Studies. Her experience repeatedly placed her among predominantly veterinary leadership groups, where she saw how easily the technician perspective could disappear from the conversation. “Representation is not simply about being given a seat; it is about whether every person occupying that seat is empowered to meaningfully participate once they arrive,” she argues.
Her own experience gave that argument a sharper edge. During the COVID period, Selke was working 60 to 70 hours a week while running a specialty and emergency hospital and managing responsibilities outside the clinic. Eventually, the workload forced her to confront the limits of a professional culture that can reward endurance while overlooking its cost.
Seeking inpatient care changed how she understood boundaries and burnout. It also altered the question she was asking: rather than asking how veterinary professionals could simply withstand more pressure, she began examining the structures producing it.
Selke’s experience on the Indiana board reinforced the concern. She recalls being the sole veterinary technician among five veterinarians and challenging decisions she believed excluded her profession from meaningful participation. Her experience points toward a problem larger than workplace culture: representation has little value if the governance structure itself determines whose expertise carries weight.
That thinking eventually led Selke to establish VIBE Vet, the Veterinary Industry Board for Empowerment. The organization is designed around a broader constituency that includes veterinarians, veterinary technicians, assistants, receptionists, and other veterinary professionals, with governance intended to be driven by its members. The premise lies in the idea that the workforce responsible for delivering veterinary care should have a mechanism for participating in decisions that shape the profession.
VIBE was also developed collaboratively. Selke notes that she brought together roughly 40 veterinary professionals from different areas of the industry to help shape its bylaws and governance framework, drawing on years of association leadership and government-relations work. Her approach has increasingly focused on teaching professionals how the machinery around them works, including legislative processes and the mechanisms available for changing state-level rules.
The larger workforce debate now has to account for that infrastructure. Recruiting more veterinarians may address one part of veterinary medicine’s capacity problem, but it does not resolve the structural pressures facing the people who already make clinical care possible. A profession cannot retain skilled workers indefinitely while giving them limited influence over the conditions under which they practice.
Veterinary medicine has reached a point where the structure of its workforce demands a structural response. The profession is asking its people to carry greater responsibility while many of the mechanisms governing their careers remain concentrated elsewhere. Changing that equation requires a professional system capable of hearing from the people inside it.
