New assessment tool aims to improve wellbeing for veterinary students

Balancing work and life is a known challenge for veterinarians, and it’s one that often begins in vet school. While working to update Student AVMA’s (SAVMA) duty hour guidelines, Megan Gulsby—at the time, a third-year veterinary student and the first wellbeing officer on the National SAVMA executive board—ran into a problem: there was no data to support her proposed changes.

“The old guidelines said it was acceptable to work 80 hours a week, and … it was also acceptable to be working past a 16-hour shift,” she said. “I wanted to drop that down and also track how many hours students were working, and how many days off they were getting per shift. The biggest question I was asked when trying to make these changes was, ‘Where’s the data?’”

There wasn’t any for veterinary students, and there was very little for students of human medicine, either, although she was able to find a lot regarding human medical residents and nurses.

Still, Gulsby said, “At every turn, it was, ‘You can’t do that because we don’t have any data.’” She became frustrated in the process. “So, my second goal, after updating the duty hour guidelines, was to find a tool for veterinary students to use while they’re in clinics that measures their mental health, their wellbeing, and also gives something back to them,” she said.

From goal to reality

Gulsby connected with Phil Richmond, DVM, founder and CEO of Flourishing Phoenix Veterinary Consultants and co-founder of the PERMAH Tool for Veterinary Professional Schools and for Veterinary Workplaces at the AVMA’s first Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Wellbeing (DEIW) conference last year in Atlanta.

“I was talking to [Richmond] about my goal, because I know he’s passionate about mental health and wellbeing, and he said, ‘Well I’m working on this project [the PERMAH Tool for Veterinary Workplaces], and I think we would be able to adapt it [for veterinary schools],” she recalled. “We kind of took it from there.”

“The PERMAH tool looks at all kinds of different factors that are related to burnout. We measure burnout and we measure these psychosocial factors associated with burnout,” said Richmond. These factors include poor change management, poor workplace relationships, inadequate reward and recognition, as well as self-compassion.

Initially, Richmond said, they’d hoped to simply use the workplace version for students, but “it just didn’t fit for the didactic year students,” he said. Questions around job demands and workplace hazards simply weren’t useful for classroom students, although, he added, “It absolutely had utility for the clinical year students, since they were essentially working in a hospital.”

Succeeding together

Gulsby, who has since earned her DVM and is practicing in Florida, may have kicked off this project, but she gives plenty of credit to her counterpart, Rebecca Michelin, who is a member of the class of 2026 at the Atlantic Veterinary College in the University of Prince Edward Island and serves at the current SAVMA Wellbeing Officer for the National Executive Board.

Michelin came to vet school after working as a certified wildlife rehabilitator. “I became very familiar with the emotional pressures and compassion fatigue that come along with animal caregiving and dealing with members of the public who are very attached to the animals that they find and bring to you—which don’t always have happy endings,” she said. “I know the toll that can take. I, myself, burned out very, very hard.” Her wellbeing went from 100 to 0 very quickly, she said, because she did what a lot of animal care professionals do: she took on too much, and she internalized it all.

She was able to find support in various resources, her family, friends, and in therapy, which allowed her to stay in animal care. But when she attended her first SAVMA convention—which was when Gulsby took on the very first wellbeing officer role—Michelin was “completely inspired. I absolutely wanted to take that on,” she recalled. “I wanted to stay involved with SAVMA and take all the lessons I’ve learned about belonging and inclusion, about being open about your struggles and experiences, and share that to hopefully make things a little bit easier for the people who come up along with me, beside me, and after me.”

From the beginning, Michelin and Gulsby shared a vision of what the wellbeing officer role at SAVMA could be. “We recognized that there was a need to better understand where students were looking for support, not just provide the things we thought they needed,” Michelin said. “Megan’s connection with Phil was serendipitous in a lot of ways.”

Not only had they figured out how to manage a number of anticipated roadblocks, but Richmond also brought in Alex Miller, DVM, Manager of Veterinary Services at Blue Buffalo, who helped with the crucial task of funding the project.

Miller instantly knew this was a way to stay true to what he sees as the company’s mission to be an organization that supports the veterinary industry. “We strongly believe that we all succeed together or we don’t succeed together,” he said. “And so, this is not about thinking of us as isolated groups of veterinarians, but instead one veterinary community. We all thrive together. It’s truly our pleasure and our honor to be able to support this awesome program.”

Additionally, Miller found himself strongly aligned with the program’s goal of letting the students take the lead.

“The student body came together and said, ‘We need some tools, we need some resources, and we need information,’ and they sought a partner to help provide that,” he said. “Phil and his team were there to help answer that call rather than the wellbeing community kind of imposing its wishes upon the student body, so this is really a student driven initiative and we’re all proudly answering that call.”

Data and safety

Funding wasn’t the only potential hurdle. In order to launch the program, the SAVMA Executive Board needed to vote it through—and in a world where data has such value, the board had questions around how the data collected by the PERMAH tool would be stored and used.

Fortunately, the team had anticipated this. “We did our due diligence and were very thorough,” Michelin said, noting that Richmond considered every question that might arise and had a solution. They assured the board that the students were protected; the survey was fully anonymous, nobody would know who’d submitted what, the data was stored safely and securely. And, perhaps most importantly, they had support and resources in place for students who might realize their wellbeing wasn’t great.

That work paid off, and by the time Michelin presented the proposal, the board unanimously voted yes.

“My next challenge was to bring it to the delegates and presidents, tell them that we had this tool, that we had developed it, and then convince them to bring it to their students—and present it to them in such a way that they would be excited about it, and they’d see the benefits in bringing it to all of our SAVMA students,” said Michelin.

A solid start

It’s safe to say that this challenge has been met with gusto.

The PERMAH Tool for Veterinary Professional Schools launched in September 2025 with free access for SAVMA members; just over a month in, around 200 students had already taken the assessment.

“What I love about the PERMAH tool is that [the participants] get this printout of what the factors mean, where they’re scoring, where and how they could help themselves,” Gulsby said.

“Megan and I, throughout our work as SAVMA wellbeing officers, have maintained a list of all of the resource officers, wellbeing officers, and social workers who are involved with all the veterinary schools, and we have contact information for all of them that we keep in a database,” said Michelin.

After students take the assessment and receive their report, they also receive a list of resources. “There are different programs like Togetherall in Canada, which is a program run by the Canadian Veterinary Medical Association … There are supports like Not One More Vet and other collaborative groups within the veterinary medical field,” Michelin said. “We put links to their websites and how to contact them, and then we also put my direct email as the SAVMA wellbeing officer to say, ‘If you want resources at your school and you’re having trouble reaching out, contact me directly and I will put you in touch with someone.’”

Overcoming obstacles

Michelin feels strongly about making it as easy as possible for those in need to access the help they require.

“One of the things that I’ve gotten as feedback … is that when you’re struggling, reaching out for help is a huge, huge step. And often when you do reach out for help, there are additional steps that you then have to take,” she said. “If you want to go to a therapist, you have to research a therapist. You have to make an appointment, go through your insurance.” For someone who’s already feeling underwater, those steps can be overwhelming and prevent them from seeking care.

“I want students to know that, even though there are 20,000 of them and one of me, if I get 20,000 emails from people asking, ‘How do I get support?’ I will answer 20,000 emails to make sure they get the support they need,” Michelin said. “If it’s one more step that they don’t have to do, I think that can be really beneficial for people who are struggling.”

Sadly, the initial responses have shown that a significant number of students are experiencing that struggle.

Response options ranged from “I’m doing great,” to “I’m doing fine, but with challenges,” to “I’m struggling but managing,” to “I’m really underwater. “There’s a higher percentage of people who are really underwater than I was hoping to see, especially on our first round during the first couple of weeks of being back in school,” she said. “It wasn’t surprising, but it was still a little disappointing to see that there are so many students who are coming into the year already struggling.”

Even with that support, of course, there will still be challenges, but the hope is that these resources help students identify the things that cause them to struggle, and that the resources help them develop resiliency.

“The goal of wellbeing is not to make us infallible and invulnerable, right? It’s not that we’ll never experience any hardship or any personal or professional challenges,” said Miller. “It’s that, if you imagine our psyches as a stick, the idea is not to snap, but instead to bend, and when we acknowledge that we need a helping hand and we have the tools and resources available to seek that assistance. That’s what this is about.”

Student support

Currently, this is a pilot program for SAVMA students; Blue Buffalo is funding it for a year. Students have unlimited access to take the assessment as many times as they’d like during that year, said Richmond.

“But, if we can prove the value in it, and if we can show that the data we collect matters and that we can make meaningful change with it, then I can really foresee it being available to all veterinary students, and to veterinary technicians and technician students, to animal care technicians—to anyone in this field where wellbeing gets pushed to the side in favor of the busy day of caring for animals,” Michelin said.

“I really do feel like it can grow. We’re starting small with just our SAVMA members right now, but I hope it’s only the beginning, and we’re planting the seed of where this can go in the future.”

And in the meantime, Michelin insists her inbox is open to anybody who might need a little help—or who might want to work together on increasing the reach of this program.

“If anybody reading this article wants to reach out to me and start a connection and share an idea about how we can mutually work to benefit everyone in this field, absolutely please do!” she said. “Because the more of those connections we can build and the more of that community of support that we can create, the better able we’ll be able to meet the needs of those students, individuals, whoever needs support in ways that we might not be able to provide for them yet.”

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Photo credit: vm via E+/Getty Images 

Disclaimer: The views expressed, and topics discussed, in any NEWStat column or article are intended to inform, educate, or entertain, and do not represent an official position by the American Animal Hospital Association (AAHA) or its Board of Directors.