Health
The foundational definition comes from the World Health Organization’s 1946 constitution: health is “a state of complete physical, mental and social wellbeing, not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.”
A peer-reviewed conceptual analysis in Acta Veterinaria Scandinavica examined how veterinary literature actually defines health and found significant inconsistency — identifying five distinct working definitions in use across the field: health as normality, health as biological function, health as homeostasis, health as physical and psychological wellbeing, and health as productivity. The same review found that most veterinary textbooks offered no explicit definition of health at all, and that even where authors provided one, it had little discernible impact on how health and disease were actually handled within the profession.
Wellness
The term “wellness” has a specific, traceable origin distinct from “health” or “wellbeing.” In a landmark 1959 paper in the American Journal of Public Health, biostatistician and public health physician Halbert L. Dunn introduced the concept of “high-level wellness,” defining it for the individual as “an integrated method of functioning which is oriented toward maximizing the potential of which the individual is capable.”
Crucially, Dunn’s original concept treats wellness as a trajectory, not a fixed state: wellness does not imply a single optimum to be reached, but rather “a direction in progress toward an ever-higher potential of functioning.” This distinction is frequently lost in casual usage today.
The AVMA has explicitly moved away from using “wellness” as its primary professional support term, noting that in many fields — including human healthcare and medical insurance — the word has come to refer mainly to measurable biometric variables such as weight, height, or blood pressure. As the AVMA states directly: “Wellbeing involves a more holistic view of an individual’s health, taking into account a variety of factors, including ones that can’t be measured by a number. Wellbeing isn’t a single measure of health.”
Wellbeing
Wellbeing is the broadest and most holistic of the three terms, and it is the term the contemporary veterinary literature has converged on. A 2025 peer-reviewed review in Frontiers in Veterinary Science, authored by veterinary wellbeing researchers across four institutions, offers a precise working definition grounded in positive psychology: “Wellbeing can be simply defined as feeling good and functioning well.”
The same paper specifies that wellbeing involves flourishing across multiple areas of life captured by the PERMA model — Positive emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Accomplishment — with a sixth dimension (Health) added in more recent frameworks in recognition of the centrality of physical health to overall wellbeing.
The peer-reviewed WSAVA Global Guidelines on Professional Wellness, published in the Journal of Small Animal Practice, are unusually candid about the conceptual ambiguity in the field. Citing Brady et al. (2018), the guidelines acknowledge: “The continued absence of a shared definition… may lead to inaccurate inferences regarding the relationship between measures of physician wellness and the latent construct of physician wellness that the measures represent.” The same problem, they note, applies to the veterinary team.
For their own purposes, WSAVA settled on the Oxford English Dictionary definition: wellbeing as “the state of being happy, healthy or prosperous,” related to physical, psychological, or moral welfare — closely tied to a sense of meaning and purpose rooted fundamentally in relationships with oneself, other people, and the natural world.
Why the Distinction Matters
Conflating these terms leads programming to target the wrong level of the problem. The Frontiers review is explicit that individual-level wellness interventions are insufficient on their own: teaching mindfulness skills may address exhaustion, one component of burnout, but leaves the other two core elements — cynicism and reduced professional efficacy — untouched, because such interventions do not change the nature of the workplace or institution itself. A large-scale UK workplace study cited in the same review reinforces this point: across more than 46,000 workers in 233 organizations, participants in individual-level wellbeing programs such as mindfulness and resilience training showed no improvement in wellbeing outcomes compared to non-participants. A combined approach addressing both job resources and job demands was needed instead.
This has direct implications for how this portal should be read: a page of breathing exercises and a recipe collection (wellness behaviors) cannot substitute for institutional-level wellbeing infrastructure — CAPS access, workload review pathways, OCP support during clinical year, and financial aid.
Burnout Is an Occupational Construct, Not a Personal Failing
Based on more than 40 years of research, the World Health Organization defines burnout as “a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed,” characterized by three dimensions: energy depletion or exhaustion, increased mental distance or cynicism related to one’s job, and reduced professional efficacy. Critically, burnout is specific to the occupational context and should not be applied to describe experiences in other life areas, nor treated as a medical condition in itself — though it can predispose individuals to later mental and physical health conditions.
Veterinary Students Show Measurably Worse Outcomes Than Peer Health-Profession Populations
A systematic review found that the prevalence of mental health issues in veterinary students is significantly higher than in other health profession student populations. A separate narrative review synthesizing 21 peer-reviewed studies found that veterinary students consistently report higher levels of perceived stress, anxiety, and depression compared to the general population, with academic demands, time pressure, and curriculum intensity cited as the most significant stressors, alongside social factors including homesickness, relationship status, and living arrangements. One widely cited dataset found that of 1,245 veterinary students surveyed, 49.1% reported moderate stress and 66.4% reported mild to moderate depression.
Physical Health Is Foundational to Wellbeing, Not a Separate Afterthought
The Frontiers review found that poor physical health and lower levels of physical activity were consistent predictors of poor mental health in veterinary students. On average, veterinary students have been found to sleep less than 7 hours at night and to exercise only twice weekly. This is the empirical basis for treating sleep and nutrition content as core wellbeing infrastructure rather than a peripheral extra.
References
- World Health Organization. (1946). Constitution of the World Health Organization.
- Dunn, H. L. (1959). High-level wellness for man and society. American Journal of Public Health, 49(6), 786–792.
- Corrigan, V. K., Newman, R. L., Richmond, P., Strand, E. B., & Vaisman, J. M. (2025). The future of flourishing in veterinary medicine: a systems-informed positive psychology approach in veterinary education. Frontiers in Veterinary Science, 11, 1484412.
- Paton, M., et al. (2024). WSAVA professional wellness guidelines. Journal of Small Animal Practice.
- Conceptualisation of health and disease in veterinary medicine. Acta Veterinaria Scandinavica.
- McArthur, M. L., Andrews, J. R., Brand, C., & Hazel, S. J. (2017). The prevalence of compassion fatigue among veterinary students in Australia and the associated psychological factors. Journal of Veterinary Medical Education, 44(1), 9–21.
- Exploring mental health in veterinary students: common stressors and effective coping strategies, a narrative review (2025). Frontiers in Veterinary Science.
- A systematic review of mental health–improving interventions in veterinary students (2019). Journal of Veterinary Medical Education.
- AVMA. Nine dimensions of wellbeing: holistic health for the veterinarian.