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The Future of Belonging: Designing the Post-Resilience Profession

The Era We Outgrew

For more than a decade, resilience has been the profession’s north star. We built wellbeing programs, posters, and policies around it — all orbiting the same premise: that resilience is the key to professional survival. We taught our students to bend without breaking, to “bounce back,” to regulate, to recover, to adapt.

Resilience language made sense at the time. It seemed compassionate, hopeful, and gave voice to distress that had long been silent.

But somewhere along the way, resilience stopped being a bridge and became a wall.
It became the reason not to change the system that kept breaking people in the first place.

We entered the resilience era believing it would save us.
We are leaving it realising it was never meant to last.

When Adaptation Becomes Endurance

Resilience is a brilliant response to short-term adversity. It is not a sustainable framework for chronic harm.

When a workplace requires continuous resilience to survive, it isn’t thriving — it’s tolerating dysfunction.

Veterinary medicine became a place where adaptability was romanticised and exhaustion was normalised. The more we applauded coping, the less we examined the conditions that required it.

The message drifted from “we care about your wellbeing” to “please stay functional within the same environment.” That shift cost us deeply — in morale, in trust, and in people.

What began as a language of empowerment slowly became a quiet abdication of responsibility. Resilience was meant to help us recover from adversity; instead, it became the reason adversity was never questioned. At Vetquity, we call this the resilience reflex — a system’s instinct to preserve itself by individualising blame.

The Cost of the Resilience Reflex

The resilience reflex has carried a profound moral cost.

Every time a clinician collapses under unmanageable workload, every time a new graduate burns out in silence, every time a person with disability, neurodivergence, or chronic illness is told to “be more resilient,” we reinforce the belief that harm is personal failure.

It’s a cruel inversion of responsibility: those least protected by the system are blamed for not surviving it gracefully.

Even the language betrays us.

We “build resilience” as though humans were infrastructure. We “train for stress tolerance” as if compassion fatigue were a technical glitch rather than an occupational hazard.

And in this process, the collective becomes invisible. The problem is never “us”; it is always “you.”

The Cracks in the Narrative

The pandemic exposed what the wellbeing movement tried to patch. Burnout became endemic; resignations surged; clinics closed. For the first time, entire organisations — not just individuals — experienced overwhelm.

Even leaders — those meant to model resilience — reached breaking point.

We discovered what psychologists have known all along: resilience doesn’t scale. Individuals can bounce back. Systems can’t — not without redesign.

In systems thinking, feedback loops determine survival. When distress signals are pathologised as individual weakness, the feedback loop breaks. The system can no longer sense its own harm. The post-resilience era restores feedback integrity — treating fatigue, exit, and silence as system data, not moral failure.

The profession felt in its’ bones a turining point - a collective whisper: We can’t yoga our way out of structural fatigue.

This is the threshold veterinary medicine now stands upon: the end of the resilience era, and the beginning of something far more honest. The next question is not: How do we help people cope? It’s Why do they have to?

Just a few years ago, the great exodus began with veterinarians. Now it’s the veterinary nurses who are leaving in droves — and not returning.

Beyond the Individual Fix

The resilience era taught us to look inward. It gave us tools for self-awareness and emotional regulation. Those tools cannot repair a system that still normalises overwork and under-support.

We cannot mindfulness our way out of systemic fatigue.

We cannot meditate our way out of structural ableism.

We cannot self-care our way out of inequity.

Individual coping strategies help people survive the system as it is. Collective belonging strategies redesign the system so people no longer have to.

The Leadership Reckoning

Resilience culture didn’t just shape clinicians; it shaped leaders. Many learned to lead by over-functioning — carrying the team, absorbing stress, modelling stoicism.

But the post-resilience era asks for a different kind of strength: one that values reflection over relentlessness, that measures safety, not sacrifice, and treats vulnerability as data, not danger.

This is courage-based leadership: the courage to name what isn’t working, to share power, to listen before defending, and to rebuild systems that no longer serve.

It is leadership as design, not endurance.

The post-resilience era reframes wellbeing as a form of governance. If a workplace has a duty to provide infection control, it also has a duty to control psychosocial risk. Accountability shifts from the individual to the institution — from personal coping plans to organisational risk management.

(At Vetquity, this shift isn’t abstract. It’s the foundation of our Inclusion Lab Signature Series — practical frameworks that turn inclusion, accessibility, and psychological safety into measurable infrastructure.)

The Workforce as Evidence

A recent Institute for Employment Studies (IES) workforce report for the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons show what many of us have felt anecdotally for years.

Among those planning to leave the profession within the next five years, one in four veterinarians (24.1%) and more than one in four veterinary nurses (28.2%) cited a lack of accommodations for health, disability, or neurodivergent needs as a major factor.

Mental health conditions alone accounted for nearly 15% of these responses.
Physical health and chronic illness, another 6–9%.
Disclosed neurodivergence, almost 5%.

This isn’t a story about personal resilience. It’s a dataset describing systemic exclusion — a profession still designed for a narrow bandwidth of bodies, brains, and energy levels.

When we combine that with the fact that the AVA Workforce Survey (2023/2024) discovered that 38% of Australian vets had either disability, neurodivergence or chronic illness, it shows us that resilience narratives are very alienating to large parts of the workforce, who need systemic change. And granted, while they are studies from different countries - the subtext is clear: that there are major structural implications for the veterinary workforce when inclusion fails, and resilience is proferred in it’s place.

We also know that large numbers of veterinarians leave at the 5 year mark after graduating.

When inclusion fails, attrition becomes the silent audit. When adjustments are treated as inconvenience rather than infrastructure, leaving becomes an act of self-preservation.

The IES data doesn’t reveal a shortage of resilient people. It reveals a shortage of safe systems.

The Architecture of Belonging

Belonging doesn’t emerge from slogans; it’s built through design.

It looks like accessible spaces that don’t force clinicians with hearing loss, chronic pain, or sensory sensitivities to work around exclusion. It looks like policies that define fairness as equity, not sameness. It looks like data systems that count without erasing — recognising intersectionality not as complexity but as reality.

And it looks like leaders who treat disclosure safety, trauma literacy, and psychological safety as core competencies, not soft skills.

In short: belonging is infrastructure — the collective capacity to adapt together.
It is what resilience was always trying to become.

The Infrastructure of Care

A post-resilience profession will not rely on slogans or self-care modules. It will rely on infrastructure — the quiet architecture of safety that sits beneath culture.

That means:

• Accessibility by design, not adjustment.

• Equity as a measure of quality, not a moral afterthought.

• Psychological safety built into governance, not goodwill.

• Metrics that track inclusion and retention as seriously as revenue.

Belonging will replace resilience as the benchmark of wellbeing — because belonging makes resilience redundant.

The Metrics That Matter

What we measure, we make visible.

If we only measure hours worked and revenue produced, we reinforce extraction. If we measure turnover, but not belonging, we will always treat attrition as mystery. If we count mental-health incidents but not psychosocial hazards, we mistake symptoms for causes.

Belonging requires new metrics:

• Psychological safety scores in staff reviews.

• Inclusion literacy as a leadership KPI.

• Accessibility compliance audited alongside infection control.

• Demographic representation tied to accountability, not optics.

Data becomes ethical when it tells the truth about the conditions under which people work.

The Science Catches Up

The shift from resilience to belonging is not idealism — it is evidence-based reform. Decades of research — from Amy Edmondson’s psychological-safety work to Safe Work Australia’s 2023 psychosocial-hazard framework — converge on the same truth: people don’t fail because they’re fragile; they fail because environments are unsafe.

The future of veterinary wellbeing will be written in policy manuals, leadership KPIs, and the design of break rooms — not in motivational posters about bouncing back.

What Comes Next

The post-resilience era will feel different.

It will sound less like pep talks and more like honesty. It will prize redesign over grit, curiosity over control, and care over compliance. It will normalise reflection over endurance. It will design policy with lived experience, not around it. It will treat inclusion, accessibility, and psychological safety as pillars of clinical governance.

It will see belonging not as sentiment, but as infrastructure — as essential to safety as sterile technique.

Clinics will experiment with shorter rosters and shared leadership. Policies will evolve to embed equity and access. Leaders will learn to say, “This structure is the problem — not you.”

That’s what evolution looks like in a profession that finally understands resilience was only ever step one.

The Profession We Could Build

If the resilience era was about surviving the system, the post-resilience era is about rebuilding it. It’s about transforming courage from an act of defiance into a design principle. It’s about understanding that sustainability isn’t a mindset — it’s an environment.

We don’t need stronger employees or tougher leaders. We need safer systems.

And that’s exactly what this next chapter of veterinary medicine — and Vetquity — exists to help build.