Why Australia’s Vet Shortage Could Be Fixed by a Role Most Pet Owners Don’t Know About

What’s Happening at the Clinic Level

Australia’s vet workforce has been under sustained pressure for years, and the numbers reflect it. Employment in the sector has grown by 32.1% over the past five years — nearly three times the national average — but the supply of qualified vets hasn’t kept pace. According to Jobs and Skills Australia, the average time to fill a vet vacancy has jumped from eight weeks in 2014 to 25 weeks in 2023. In regional areas, the situation is more pronounced: 44% of positions in those communities took longer than 12 months to fill, or were never filled.

The consequences land directly on clinicians. Research from the Australian Veterinary Association found that more than 66% of vets have experienced a mental health condition — higher than the general population rate — with long hours, staff shortages, and client demand all contributing. It’s a system under structural stress, and more recruitment alone won’t fix it.

The Role Sitting Between Nurse and Vet

Most pet owners are familiar with vet nurses — the clinical staff who assist during appointments, administer treatments, and keep a clinic running between consultations. Fewer know that a distinct, higher-qualified role also exists: the veterinary technologist.

Where vet nurses are typically trained through vocational qualifications, vet technologists hold a three-year bachelor’s degree. The University of Queensland launched Australia’s first Bachelor of Veterinary Technology in 2000, and remains the only university in the country to offer the programme. Graduates are trained across a broad clinical scope — emergency first aid, diagnostic imaging, pathology testing, dental care, anaesthesiology, surgery preparation, and postoperative care.

That’s work that sits clearly between what a vet nurse ordinarily performs and what a registered veterinarian handles. And two-thirds of UQ’s vet tech graduates are hired directly by the clinics where they completed their placement, which suggests there’s genuine demand for the role at the practice level — even if regulation hasn’t caught up with it.

Qualified, But Constrained

The problem isn’t a gap in training. It’s a gap in recognition.

Dr Patricia Clarke coordinated UQ’s veterinary technologist degree when it launched and now sits on the Working Party for Statutory Regulation of Veterinary Nurses and Technologists. Her assessment is direct: vet technologists are currently “academically qualified beyond what the law allows them to perform.”

Western Australia is the only jurisdiction that currently mandates registration of vet nurses and technologists. Elsewhere, these practitioners work without title protection, without a defined legal scope of practice, and without the formal regulatory standing that comparable allied health roles carry. As Dr Clarke has noted, the veterinary industry is lagging behind the ABS’s own classification — which is a strange position to be in.

The Dental Hygienist Argument

The dental profession offers a template that the veterinary sector keeps being told to look at. Dental hygienists hold a defined scope of practice — they perform specific procedures under supervision without needing to be registered dentists. The framework protects patients, creates sustainable career pathways, and allows dentists to concentrate on work that genuinely requires their qualification level. It works because the regulatory structure makes it work.

Academics at UQ argue that vet technologists could operate the same way. A bachelor’s degree vet technologist, working within a formally recognised and legally protected scope, could perform the kind of clinical tasks currently piling pressure on vets — diagnostic imaging, anaesthesia monitoring, dental procedures, postoperative care — without requiring a vet to be present for every step.

What Regulatory Reform Would Actually Change

For pet owners, the practical argument comes down to access. More registered vet technologists with a recognised scope of practice means more clinical tasks can be safely delegated. Vets can focus on diagnosis, complex surgery, and serious illness. Appointment backlogs ease. Wait times come down. And the profession becomes more sustainable to work in.

Queensland is currently reviewing its Veterinary Surgeons Act — legislation that dates back 90 years — which governs qualifications, registration, and disciplinary processes. Whether statutory recognition of vet technologists emerges from that review is uncertain, but the conversation is formally on the legislative agenda for the first time in a long time.

“In a time of critical workforce shortages with veterinarians suffering from increasing levels of stress, burnout and high suicide rates, it is time to seriously consider transformational industry reforms.” — Associate Professor Rebekah Scotney, UQ School of Veterinary Science

What Stays the Same for Now

For pet owners, the immediate answer is: not much changes yet. Regulatory reform moves slowly, and even with Queensland’s review underway, any changes to registration frameworks across multiple states would take years to filter through to clinic staffing and appointment availability.

But the markers are there. WA has a functioning registration model to draw from. The ABS classification gives the profession a formal basis to work with. And UQ graduates keep being absorbed directly into clinics that already know what they can do.

The structural fix is identifiable. The training pipeline exists. The demand at clinic level is real. The remaining variable is whether the regulatory framework moves fast enough to put these two things together before more vets leave, more clinics cut hours, and more pet owners find themselves with nowhere to go.