Meet Connexity keynote speaker and veterinary wellbeing expert Carrie Jurney
Carrie Jurney, DVM, DACVIM, was boarded in neurology in 2009, but found her true calling when she took over the presidency of Not One More Vet in February of 2020—right at the start of the pandemic.
Connexity keynote speaker Carrie Jurney, DVM, DACVIM, was boarded in neurology in 2009, but found her true calling when she took over the presidency of Not One More Vet (NOMV) in February 2020, right at the start of the pandemic.
âWe had no idea what hardships the next year would bring,â Jurney told NEWStat. âItâs been a wild ride.â
NOMV, now the largest wellness-focused charity for veterinary wellbeing in the worldâmembership rose to 25,000 members during the pandemicâhelps veterinary professionals cope with crises and compassion fatigue.
In her upcoming Connexity keynote address on Saturday, September 16, Jurney will talk about why thereâs a wellbeing problem in veterinary medicine. But sheâll do more than just recite a litany of the challenges we face. Sheâll also talk about what we can do to meet those challenges: âI think itâs really important that we donât just focus on the negative and we talk about what we can do,â Jurney said. âBecause there absolutely are solutions.â
Why itâs been so bad during COVID
âWe took an already stressful profession and turned the heat up,â she said. âWe were already a lightly-staffed profession, and we lost a lot of staff members. Â We were already a profession that had to deal with a lot of conflict and emotional work, so that just increased as well.â
Jurney acknowledged that veterinarians certainly werenât the only people who experienced stress during the pandemic: âThe whole world was going through a traumatic experience, but the specifics of how we work and how we interact with our clients really made it a lot harder.â
The switch to curbside care was just one example.
Jurney said NOMV experienced exponential growth during the pandemic. (She pronounces it NOM-vee âbecause Not One More Vet is a mouthful.â) She said NOMVâs services were needed, and NOMVâs grants program is a good example. âIn 2019Â we gave out something like $30,000 in financial aid to veterinary professionals. In 2021, it was $150,000.â
She said that jump shows the increase in need. âIâve been really inspired by how much the veterinary community has stepped up to help us provide that support.â
What makes NOMVâs membership growth notable is the fact that thereâs long been a stigma associated with seeking therapy and support for emotional stress.
Jurney notes that when researchers polled presidents of state veterinary medical associations in 2015 on their reactions to the unusually high suicide rate among veterinary professionals, the results were sobering:Â âOnly 30% of them believed our increased risk of suicide was even a problem.â
Fortunately, awareness of the problem has grown since then, due in part to a landmark 2020 study of the prevalence of mental illness and levels of wellbeing in the veterinary profession conducted by the AVMA and Merck Animal Health. And a 2019 study by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed that female veterinarians are 3.5 times more likely to die by suicide than members of the general population. Taken together, the studies confirmed what many in the profession already suspected: a lot of veterinariansâand veterinary support staffâwere in serious emotional trouble.
As someone whoâs been speaking on veterinary wellbeing since 2015, Jurney says sheâs seen a gradual but steady change in how we talk about wellbeing as a profession: âI think the stigma is decreasing, but I still think we have a ways to go,â she adds. âIf you conducted that poll today, I think the result would be a lot different. The fact that I was invited to give the keynote at Connexity is proof of that.â
Contrast that to when she gave her first wellbeing lecture just a few years back; she was given six hours to talk about neurology, and one hour to talk about wellbeing. âAnd that one hour was going to be at 6 a.m.â
âNow weâre at the point where we have entire tracks devoted to wellbeing, and people like me talk about it during the keynote,â she says. âSo the profession has come a long way in talking about the problem. The next phase is working on it and starting to solve the problem.â
It wonât be easy, but as Jurney notes, people in the veterinary medicine profession are fixers: âAnd we can fix this.â
Hear Carrie Jurney talk about how to improve veterinary wellbeing this September in Nashville. Register for Connexity today.