Credentialed Growth at Mission Pet Health:
Inside the Surgical Mentorship Center and What It Means for New Veterinarians
Veterinary school teaches medicine. It doesn’t always teach surgery with the depth new graduates need before they’re standing at an operating table with a scared owner in the waiting room. That gap, between classroom knowledge and surgical confidence, is one of the most consistently cited reasons new veterinarians burn out or leave the profession within their first few years. Mission Pet Health built a facility specifically to close it.
This second profile in BPI’s Mission Pet Health series looks past the general culture overview to focus on a single, concrete initiative: what the company’s new surgical training center actually does, and what it signals about how Mission Pet Health approaches career growth at scale.
The Data Behind the Growth Story
Mission Pet Health’s 2026 LOWI (Love of Workplace Index) survey collected responses from 305 employees and returned an overall SPARK score of 92.6, among the strongest in Best Practice Institute’s certified employer portfolio. Achievement was the top-scoring SPARK dimension at 94.4. Love of co-workers scored 96.1, love of the company scored 93.1, and 285 of 305 open-ended responses were positive.
Mission Pet Health is a certified Most Loved Workplace®, ranked #2 on America’s Top 100 Most Loved Workplaces® 2025 and re-certified in 2026, with a CertCheck Love Score of 100. The organization operates more than 850 hospitals and specialty centers across more than 40 states, employing roughly 20,500 people, the result of the December 2024 merger of Southern Veterinary Partners and Mission Veterinary Partners.
Growth at that scale requires infrastructure, not good intentions. The Dallas-area surgical mentorship center is a clear example of what that infrastructure looks like in practice.
Inside the Dr. Barbara Craig Surgical Mentorship Center
In July 2026, Mission Pet Health and Operation Kindness Humane Society opened the Dr. Barbara Craig Surgical Mentorship Center in Carrollton, Texas, with a ribbon-cutting ceremony marking its launch. The center is a dedicated facility built specifically to give early-career veterinarians hands-on surgical training and mentorship, led by Operation Kindness medical staff, through real procedures on shelter animals in need of care.
The numbers behind the initiative are specific: the center is projected to train more than 300 new graduate veterinarians annually while helping deliver surgical care to an estimated 10,000 pets each year. Dr. Dan Markwalder, Chief Veterinary Officer at Mission Pet Health, framed the partnership directly: “Every surgery performed through this surgical mentorship center strengthens a new veterinarian’s confidence while helping reduce pet overpopulation and improving animal welfare across our communities.”
Ed Jamison, President and CEO of Operation Kindness, described the ambition behind the model in national terms, not just local ones: “We’re not just trying to solve problems here in Dallas, in DFW, even in North Texas. This is literally going to help the entire country by giving these veterinarians those very much needed skills to be able to take back to their home states and home cities.”
That’s a meaningful distinction from a typical in-house training program. Rather than simply adding mentorship hours inside existing hospitals, Mission Pet Health built dedicated capacity, in partnership with a nonprofit whose mission already centered on shelter medicine, specifically to solve the surgical-confidence gap at a scale that reaches beyond its own hospital network.
Why This Solves a Real Industry Problem
The veterinary profession has a well-documented pipeline problem: new graduates enter practice with strong medical knowledge but comparatively limited hands-on surgical repetitions, since veterinary school clinical rotations can only expose students to so many procedures before graduation. That gap shows up almost immediately in a new veterinarian’s first year of practice, when surgical confidence, not medical knowledge, becomes the limiting factor in what cases they’re comfortable handling independently.
Mission Pet Health’s model addresses this directly by giving new graduates a structured cohort experience: real surgical cases, experienced mentors, and a facility designed for teaching rather than pure production. That’s a materially different value proposition than a hospital simply promising “mentorship” as a line item in a job posting.
How This Connects to the Broader Growth Story
The surgical mentorship center isn’t an isolated initiative. It’s consistent with how Mission Pet Health has approached growth since the 2024 merger. The organization expanded from roughly 24 states to more than 40, adding more than 100 hospitals in a single year, while deliberately preserving what employees describe as local autonomy: individual hospital teams retain the ability to operate based on the specific needs of the community they serve, rather than following a single standardized playbook imposed from a corporate office.
That local-autonomy approach shows up in the survey data too. Respect scored 92.6, and no single SPARK dimension fell below 90, a level of consistency that’s difficult to sustain through rapid, acquisition-driven growth unless the underlying operating model is genuinely decentralized rather than centralized on paper only.
The company’s WAG values, Work Together, Amaze, and Grow, are the throughline connecting the surgical mentorship center to the rest of the culture. “Grow” isn’t confined to a performance review conversation; it shows up as a purpose-built facility solving a documented industry problem, mentorship extended broadly across the network, and a growth trajectory that added scale without eroding the achievement and respect scores that define the employee experience.
What This Means for Veterinary Professionals Evaluating Mission Pet Health
For a new graduate veterinarian, “career growth” at most employers means a vague promise of mentorship from whichever senior doctor happens to be on shift. At Mission Pet Health, it now means a dedicated facility, a named partnership with a respected veterinary nonprofit, and a specific annual capacity commitment: 300+ new veterinarians, 10,000 pets. That’s a concrete, verifiable claim rather than a recruiting talking point, and it’s the kind of infrastructure investment that explains why Achievement is the single highest-scoring dimension in the company’s entire employee survey.
Frequently Asked Questions About Career Growth at Mission Pet Health
Does Mission Pet Health offer career growth for new veterinarians and vet techs?
What is the Dr. Barbara Craig Surgical Mentorship Center?
How large is Mission Pet Health?
How does Mission Pet Health rank as a Most Loved Workplace®?
What are Mission Pet Health's WAG values?
Where can I see Mission Pet Health's full employer profile?
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