The correlation of veterinary compensation and mental health

If there is one thing I’ve learned from negotiating compensation with dozens of veterinarians over the years (both as employer and employee), it is how we are paid is nothing if not a highly divisive subject. By that I do not mean to say we disdain one another’s points of view—we don’t, really—yet it is nevertheless clear most of us have acquired a definite preference for how we would like to be paid for our clinical work and, by extension, how we would like our colleagues to be compensated, too.

A recent article in the VIN News Service1 on the subject of compensation structure and mental health offered a fresh take on the subject, arguing production-based pay structures are detrimental to our mental health. Predictably, this led t...