In veterinary medicine, we care about animals and often forget to care about the people serving them. Every day, teams manage complex medical cases, emotionally charged clients, and fast-paced clinical environments. Add the physical risks of animal handling, radiation exposure, and chemical use, and it’s easy to see why stress levels increase to unsustainable levels.

We often overlook how important a safe workplace can be, even though discussions around burnout and mental health have gained traction in recent years. Increasing physical safety often increases psychological safety (Bronkhorst, 2015). That’s where collaboration between Certified Safety Training (CST) and Not One More Vet (NOMV) comes in: bridging compliance and compassion to help veterinary professionals thrive sustainably.

Together, CST’s OSHA expertise and NOMV’s CLEAR Blueprint offer a path forward for practices ready to prioritize both safety and wellbeing.

1. The Hidden Link Between Safety and Stress

Unclear protocols and unsafe conditions create more than physical danger—they can chronically contribute to increased feelings of anxiety. Team members that worry about potential injuries, chemical exposure, or handling temperamental patients without proper equipment can remain physically tense and emotionally disquieted. Over time, that tension contributes to fatigue, irritability, and disengagement. All of those can be precursors to experiencing burnout (Steffey, et al., 2023).

CLEAR Blueprint provides clinics with educational resources and tools that help workplaces care for the caregivers. Organizations that empower leadership to activate and demonstrate genuine compassion for their team are helping to promote trust. This can be done by preventing moral injury through caseload management, providing transparent expectations for client behaviors, and a variety of other strategies explored in CLEAR Blueprint.

2. Structure Reduces Cognitive Load

In a typical day, a veterinary professional makes numerous decisions: medication doses, triage priorities, restraint techniques, and more. Without structured safety protocols, each of those decisions carries extra mental weight (Wu, et al., 2021).

CST’s Veterinary OSHA Program helps streamline decision making, increase compliance, and decrease injury risk. With a clearly defined veterinary safety program, staff know they are in a workplace that cares about safety. This reduces decision fatigue, freeing cognitive bandwidth for patient care and emotional presence.

NOMV shares this objective through CLEAR's Shaping Emotional Wellbeing in Veterinary Practice module. In it, content demonstrates that professional development and continuing education serve to empower and protect staff. Every safety drill or compliance refresher is an act of learning that enhances both physical and mental readiness.

3. Accountability Builds Psychological Safety

Accountability can sometimes sound punitive, but among healthy teams it’s empowering. When everyone from kennel assistants to senior veterinarians shares in the responsibility for promoting safety, the culture shifts from reprimanding to collaboration.

Psychological safety is a key determinant of mental health at work that arises when individuals feel safe to speak up about mistakes or hazards without retaliation. NOMV can help teams to develop and maintain an inclusive, equitable, and psychologically safe culture. When all voices are heard and valued, the entire team benefits. The content in CLEAR's Creating an Engaging Workplace Culture encourages effective communication as a means to promote improved well-being and operational outcomes.

Silence in a veterinary hospital can lead to undesirable outcomes, including injury or illness on the job. Leaders that conduct routine safety check-ins, regularly invite feedback, and act on staff concerns communicate through demonstration to everyone that it’s okay to discuss challenges. That same openness then translates to conversations about mental well-being (Chapman, et al., 2025).

4. Visibility Turns Safety Into Recognition

It’s easy to overlook the innumerable small actions veterinary professionals take hourly to prevent harm. However, teams can see the tangible impact of this work by collectively tracking and celebrating safety improvements. For example, identify accessible but critical safety goals such as reducing sharps injuries, improving controlled drug storage and handling, or updating evacuation drills regularly. Recognizing safety milestones also positions practices for better insurance outcomes, demonstrating to carriers that proactive risk management is part of the clinic’s culture (Chapman, et al., 2025).

Teams that provide visibility to these kinds of safety successes help reinforce a sense of competence and control throughout the organizational culture. CLEAR Blueprint provides information and support that empower teams to create and activate cultures of workplace wellness. Both CST and NOMV highlight the importance and benefits of seeing the impact of a physically and psychologically safe workplace.

5. Leadership’s Role: Modeling Self-Care Through Safety

Organizational leadership has an obligation to model healthy and safe behavior. One aspect vital to demonstrate is the interdependence of self-care and safe work. This approach from leaders can help transform a culture of compliance into one built on compassion.

CLEAR’s content in the module Building Trusting Teams speaks directly to this transformative potential. Leaders have a duty to model healthy, safe behaviors and to prioritize both physical and mental safety as integral to the business’s success. This means:

• Formalizing safety as a job responsibility for all staff
• Creating and protecting budgets for safety and wellbeing initiatives
• Encouraging rest and recovery after high-stress events
• Viewing mistakes as learning opportunities, not failures — ask “what did we learn from this?”

By embracing accountability, leadership turns the concept of safety from an inconvenient rulebook into a dynamic reflection of core values.

6. A Shared Mission

NOMV and CST both promote well-being from different starting places but share in common the goals of protecting and empowering the people that dedicate their lives to animal care and welfare. Together, we advocate for a veterinary profession where no one’s physical safety or mental health is left ignored.

Creating, promoting, and maintaining a safe workplace is an act of compassion. It communicates the same message to all team members: you matter, and we want you to go home healthy, in body and mind.