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The Invisible Exit Interviews: Why We Don’t Hear From the People Who Leave

The Stories We Don’t Record

I keep hearing variations on the same story.

A nurse with chronic fatigue requests fewer consecutive 12-hour shifts and is told the roster “can’t be changed for one person.” A client care leader with chronic pain requests an ergonomic workstation. A colleague managing depression asks for a little more flexibility around shift swaps. A senior colleague with arthritis asks for modified duties during surgery days.

The response is often the same: silence, dismissal, or worse — the sense that raising the issue has marked them as a “problem.”

Exhausted, unsupported, and with no path forward, they quietly leave.

In Australia, these stories rarely make it into the data. We don’t formally track how disability, neurodivergence, or mental health intersect with attrition. That blind spot is dangerous: what isn’t measured is too easily ignored.

Yet in the UK, the RCVS 2024 Surveys of the Veterinary Profession and Veterinary Nursing Profession gives us a glimpse into the truth. For vets and vet nurses considering leaving the profession in the next five years, lack of accommodations for mental health conditions, disability, or disclosed neurodivergence was cited as a major contributing factor for 24% of veterinarians and 28% of veterinary nurses.

One in four.

That’s not a niche issue. That’s a systemic fracture.

The Headline We Keep Reading

Every few months, another headline reminds us of the workforce crisis in veterinary medicine. Too many are leaving. Too few are staying. Taskforces are formed, surveys distributed, working groups convened. We pore over the data, discuss wellbeing, and circle around the same questions: Why are we losing so many good people?

But here’s the problem: the people we most need to hear from aren’t in the room anymore.

They’ve already left.

The Silent Majority

Our profession has become skilled at measuring what is visible: attrition rates, vacancy data, hours worked, burnout symptoms among those still employed. But silence has its own story.

When a vet or nurse resigns, they may be offered an exit interview. On paper, that looks like accountability. In practice, it rarely is.

How candid can you really be on your way out the door — especially if your future references, your reputation, or your ability to ever return to the clinic are on the line?

Many soften their feedback, saying the “safe” things: moving interstate, family reasons, “time for a change.” Others are simply too exhausted to explain. After months or years of surviving a toxic workplace, the thought of reliving the trauma in conversation with the very managers who ignored red flags feels unbearable.

And those who quietly walk away from the profession altogether? Their voices are never recorded. They’re not filling in wellbeing surveys. They’re not on conference panels. They’re not posting long reflections on LinkedIn.

We lose not just their skills, but the unfiltered insight into what finally tipped them over the edge.

The Skewed Story We Tell Ourselves

When we design workforce solutions without those voices, we create blind spots. The data leans toward the perspectives of people who still had the resilience, privilege, or safety nets to remain.

That means we miss:

• The corrosive effect of toxic cultures — where bullying, exclusion, or power abuse go unchecked.

• The slow grind of microaggressions — especially for women, LGBTQIA+ staff, disabled and neurodivergent team members, and those from underrepresented cultural backgrounds.

• The financial cliff edge — where underpayment, unpaid overtime, and ballooning student debt collide.

• The hidden attrition of equity-seeking groups — staff who never had the same chance to belong in the first place, and for whom “resilience” was never the right answer.

And so we end up designing partial solutions: wellness programs, flexible rosters, mindfulness apps. Helpful in the short term, perhaps. But they sit on top of deeper structural issues like wallpaper over cracks in the foundation.

Exit as Systemic Feedback

Here’s the shift we need to make: exit isn’t a personal failing. It’s systemic feedback.

When someone leaves a practice, that’s not just a staffing inconvenience. It’s a message. It tells us something about culture, workload, leadership, and inclusion.

Every resignation is a data point in the story of our profession’s health. But because we aren’t collecting or amplifying those data points, we keep missing the warning signs.

Inclusion is often defined by who stays — but it should also be measured by who feels pushed out.

The Inclusion Lens: Who Leaves, and Why

It’s no coincidence that attrition doesn’t fall evenly across the workforce.

• Disabled and chronically ill vets often face rigid workplace systems built on outdated assumptions of what a “good vet” looks like: endlessly available, fully abled, and able to work 50+ hours without complaint. When reasonable adjustments are treated as burdens or “special favours,” many simply conclude the profession wasn’t built for them.

• Neurodivergent colleagues may leave after years of being told their communication style is a “problem” rather than a difference, or after their requests for clarity and structure are dismissed as unreasonable.

• Women, carers, and those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds encounter systemic barriers when career progression depends on long, inflexible hours or unpaid internships.

• LGBTQIA+ professionals may walk away from teams where casual homophobia or transphobia goes unchallenged — not because they lack resilience, but because they lack safety.

These aren’t side issues. They are core drivers of attrition. And when we fail to collect the stories of those who leave, we erase the role of exclusion in shaping our workforce crisis.

What We Could Do Differently

If we treated exits as a form of professional accountability — not just an HR checkbox — the landscape would look different.

1. Independent exit interviews
   Not conducted by direct managers, but by external reviewers or neutral third parties, to reduce fear of retaliation.

2. Sector-wide attrition studies
   Professional bodies could commission independent studies that deliberately seek out those who have already left — via alumni networks, private outreach, or anonymous surveys.

3. Inclusion metrics alongside retention metrics
   We should track who is leaving, not just how many. Patterns of disproportionate attrition reveal systemic inequities long before overall headcount data does.

4. Feedback loops with transparency
   Insights shouldn’t vanish into HR filing cabinets. They should be reported back to staff, professional associations, and regulators — creating a cycle where leaving voices shape meaningful reform.

5. Cultural humility in leadership
   Leaders need training not just in clinical management, but in listening: holding space for uncomfortable truths, and treating them as opportunities for structural improvement rather than reputational threat.

This isn’t about collecting stories for the sake of it. It’s about making sure what is learned is acted on.

Exit Interviews as Leadership

Listening is often mistaken for passivity — as if it means doing nothing. Yet, in leadership, listening is an active stance.

It takes courage to sit with feedback that cuts to the bone: that a beloved workplace culture felt exclusionary to others, that leadership choices caused harm, that our systems are harder on some than on others.

Discomfort is data. And if we are willing to hear it, it can guide us toward the reforms that matter most.

Inclusion isn’t about everyone being happy all the time. It’s about whether the profession can make space for truth, even when truth is painful.

Why This Moment Matters

Veterinary medicine is at a crossroads. Workforce shortages are no longer abstract — they’re reshaping the entire profession: from recruitment and retention, to access to care, to the sustainability of rural and regional practices.

We can’t fix this by tweaking rosters or running resilience webinars alone. We have to face the harder question: What kind of profession are people leaving behind?

The invisible exit interviews hold the answers. They carry the perspectives we’ve overlooked, the voices we’ve muted, and the truths we’ve been reluctant to confront.

If we ignore them, we risk repeating the same cycle: pouring energy into short-term fixes while the deeper fractures widen. But if we choose to listen — really listen — we can redesign veterinary medicine into a place where more people not only survive, but thrive.

The Challenge Ahead

Listening to those who have left won’t be easy. It will mean facing uncomfortable truths about culture, leadership, and inequity. It will mean admitting that some of our most celebrated practices were part of the problem.

But the alternative is worse: to keep losing brilliant vets and nurses, and to keep pretending we don’t know why.

The question isn’t whether the invisible exit interviews exist. They do. They are written in every resignation, every withdrawn registration, every quiet farewell.

The question is whether veterinary medicine is ready to hear them — and to act.