Factors influencing equine veterinarians' job satisfaction and retention: A focus group study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: There is a shortage of equine veterinarians. Understanding what factors are associated with job satisfaction in equine veterinarians can inform interventions to increase retention in equine medicine. OBJECTIVE: To explore the prominent factors causing work dissatisfaction and burnout in equine veterinarians. STUDY DESIGN: Qualitative research study consisting of semi-structured focus groups. METHODS: Thirty-seven current and former equine veterinarians across the United States were recruited via snowball and convenience sampling to answer questions on work history, work-life balance, and perceptions of equine practice. Transcripts were analysed in Delve and coded in the context of the Conservation of Resources (COR) theory. A card sorting activity was used to rank the four types of resources in the COR theory (condition, object, energy, and personal). RESULTS: Condition resources were the most frequently mentioned reasons for work dissatisfaction. These included issues with discrimination or bias due to age, race/ethnicity, and gender, unpredictable and long hours, and heavy workloads. Object resources, such as equipment, were rarely mentioned. Energy resources, including pay and student loan debt, were influential, with most participants feeling that equine veterinarians are underpaid. Personal resources, such as problem-solving skills and enjoyment in helping others, improved job satisfaction. MAIN LIMITATIONS: Although recruiting efforts prioritised perspectives of black, indigenous, and people of colour, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer plus identities, and members with disabilities, demographic information was not directly collected. CONCLUSIONS: The main barriers to equine veterinary retention included a lack of work-life balance, long hours, lower-than-expected pay, and issues with discrimination and bias. This study highlights areas for intervention to improve the equine veterinary field, such as higher pay, rural practice incentives, and effective diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB) efforts. A shift toward caseload-sharing between veterinarians could help alleviate excessive emergency on-call and burnout.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".