An upstream approach to veterinary workforce wellbeing: an evaluative review of an embedded wellbeing curriculum in veterinary education.

Veterinary professionals work in demanding environments shaped by individual, relational, organizational, and systemic pressures. Veterinary education can therefore serve as an upstream setting for developing both clinical competence and the capabilities needed for sustainable professional engagement and wellbeing. Competency-based veterinary education offers a structure for treating wellbeing as a professional capability that can be taught, practiced, assessed, and evaluated. This study reports an evaluative review of a longitudinal wellbeing curriculum embedded within the Doctor of Veterinary Medicine program at the Melbourne Veterinary School. Data sources included curriculum documents, curriculum mapping, two non-participant teaching observations, and collaborative interpretation by veterinary education and wellbeing science experts. AAVMC CBVE® 2.0 and the Wellbeing Integrated Learning Design framework served as evaluative lenses. The review examined how wellbeing science was integrated across the formal curriculum and identified priorities for strengthening alignment, delivery, assessment, and evaluation. The intended learning outcomes were conceptually appropriate, developmentally sequenced, and aligned most strongly with CBVE® Domain 7. However, constructive alignment with assessment was incomplete. Opportunities for applied practice and feedback were limited, no explicit formal wellbeing curriculum was present in the final clinical year, and links among wellbeing, communication, and systems-level contributors were infrequent. Priorities included greater vertical integration, intentional learning design, applied professional practice, formative reflection, educator development, and longitudinal evaluation. Because systematic student and educator feedback was not collected, the findings describe the formal curriculum but do not establish how it was experienced or whether it improved learner outcomes. The study offers an adaptable process for reviewing, refining, and evaluating embedded wellbeing curricula within existing veterinary education structures from a systems-informed perspective.