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Why So Many Vets Hide: The Cultural Blind Spot We Can No Longer Ignore

When Vetquity published “The 38% We Never Saw,” many people were surprised. Surprised that so many veterinarians identified with disability, chronic illness, or neurodivergence once given the safety to do so.

But surprise itself is the symptom of our silence problem.

People were astonished because they have been working for decades beside colleagues who never felt safe enough to say, me too.

Non-disclosure of invisible disability is rife in the caring professions. Globally, around 75% of people with disability never disclose to their employer, and in veterinary and medical contexts, that figure may be even higher.

At the Royal Veterinary College in London, only 3.5% of students initially disclosed a disability. When the culture became explicitly supportive and inclusive, that figure rose to 20%. The prevalence didn’t change — the safety did.

And because 80% of disability is acquired during life, the notion that veterinary schools should act as gatekeepers for a profession’s “fitness to practise” collapses under its own logic. Disability is not a pre-existing filter; it is a shared human trajectory.

Every veterinarian is one accident, diagnosis, or life change away from needing the very inclusion architecture we are still debating. To exclude now is to dismantle your own future safety net.

How Do We Transform The Profession’s Disclosure Culture?

If this is the reality, then the question becomes: how do we build a profession where people no longer have to hide?

While there are ways that individual practices can build healthy disclosure culture - such as through Vetquity’s Safe to Share toolkit - developing a healthy organisation-wide culture is very different from developing a profession-wide culture.

And that becomes the responsibility of everyone in the ecosystem — from universities to veterinary boards, CPD providers, professional associations, and corporates.

If we want disclosure to feel safe, it must be safe everywhere: from the first application form, to the lecture hall, to the job interview, to the boardroom.

The solution is not a single initiative but a shift in culture, practice, and governance. These seventeen reforms outline how the veterinary profession can build a culture where people no longer have to hide.

What follows are seventeen reforms — the building blocks of a profession designed for belonging.

1. From Deficits to Strengths

Veterinary medicine still frames difference through pathology. “Limitations,” “restrictions,” “reasonable adjustments” — even supportive language often carries the residue of deficit.
A strengths-based approach reframes disability, neurodivergence, and chronic illness as expertise in adaptation: insights that enrich empathy, innovation, and care.
Language is not semantics; it’s infrastructure.

Strengths-based language reframes the conversation. It asks:

• What does this person bring that enhances how we work?

• How might different ways of processing, communicating, or working expand our clinical capacity rather than limit it?

• How do we design workplaces that draw out those strengths rather than flatten them?

This isn’t spin — it’s safety. When people feel seen through a strengths-based lens, disclosure becomes less risky and more relational.

2. Retiring the Myth of the Omnicompetent Veterinarian

The idea that every graduate must be physically, cognitively, and emotionally equipped to do all things — large animal to lab work, emergency to orthopaedics — is fiction.
In reality, veterinarians have always found their niche.

Why cling to the outdated belief that universities must produce one universal “template vet”?
There are radiologists and clinical pathologists who never see clients.
There are leaders in policy, teaching, and research who never hold a stethoscope.
There are roles that prioritise insight over dexterity — behavioural medicine, palliative care, mobile practice, telehealth, and many still emerging.

When we dismantle the myth of the “complete clinician,” we free people to disclose what they need and where they thrive.

3. Representation as Occupational Safety

Visibility of disabled and chronically ill veterinarians in leadership is not tokenism; it’s safety infrastructure. Representation functions as collective proof of safety. When people see themselves reflected in deans, boards, and directors, inclusion becomes expected, not exceptional.

Many senior leaders reach out to me to quietly share that they have a disability, chronic illness or neurodivergence. They rarely advertise this publicly. This is unsurprising, one of the common, yet unspoken dynamics of unhealthy disclosure culture is that the more senior the role, the less likely someone is to disclose.

This often reveals a deeper issue within leadership culture itself. C-suites need to examine the norms that silence their own leaders, not only those that shape the workforce. Safety has to be demonstrated among executives if it is to be believed by everyone else.

4. Institutional Self-Reflection and Bias Literacy

Organisations can’t fix what they can’t see. Bias audits and inclusive governance reviews should be treated as safety audits, not social extras. Bias unchecked becomes culture; bias examined becomes learning.

5. Training in Cultural Humility, Not Competence

Competence implies mastery; humility implies curiosity. Cultural-humility training around language and lived experience replaces fear of getting it wrong with the courage to keep improving.

The concept of cultural humility is relevant to not just racial or ethnic minorities - it is also deeply relevant to LGBTQIA+, neurodivergent, disabled or other groups as well.

6. The Practice of Active Allyship

Allyship is not empathy — it’s engineering. It’s redesigning rosters, calling out bias, and using positional power to reduce risk for others. Passive concern changes nothing; active allyship redistributes safety.

7. Practising Disclosure in Education — EMS Passports and Beyond

Universities are where disclosure culture begins. The hidden curriculum around endurance, safety and disclosure has a long tail through the profession and takes years to unlearn. Innovative tools like non-mandatory EMS passports (trialled by University of Lancashire) allow students to communicate access needs to placement hosts without repeated re-exposure, teaching both sides to navigate difference with partnership instead of pity.

8. Clarity in Information Pathways

Students and practitioners deserve transparency about who sees their information and why.
Fear thrives in ambiguity; safety grows in clarity.

9. Ending Forced Disclosure

Mandatory health disclosure required by veterinary boards blur the line between support and surveillance. When regulation equates impairment with risk, need goes underground. No one should have to choose between honesty and employability.

10. Coherent Messaging Across the System

Every institution communicates its safety culture — even through silence. If your materials never mention accessibility, you’re signalling danger by omission. Explicitly say: We are a safe place to disclose and request support.

11. Removing Administrative Barriers

Accessibility processes must not become endurance tests. When systems demand excessive evidence or bureaucracy, they deter the very people they exist to serve. To learn more, it’s worth reading the work of Sara Ahmed, who wrote on strategic inefficiency.

12. Educating Around Invisible Disability and Fluctuating Conditions

Most disability is invisible. Without literacy around fluctuating conditions, neurodivergence, and chronic illness, disbelief becomes the default. Education that recognises intersectionality strengthens both accuracy and empathy.

13. Measurement as Moral Imperative

You can’t manage what you don’t measure. Australia’s veterinary datasets rarely capture disability or chronic illness. Integrating accessibility metrics into national surveys is overdue.
Invisibility is not absence; it’s unmeasured presence - and valuable insights are lost.

14. Flexibility Beyond Employment

Accessibility must extend to internships and residencies. If equity stops at graduation, the profession loses its own future specialists.

15. Universal Design as Standard Practice

Universal design builds inclusion from the start — not as retrofit. Accessible learning, adaptive workspaces, and flexible assessments benefit everyone. It’s not “special treatment”; it’s competent design.

16. Building Legal and Policy Literacy

Many leaders still misinterpret anti-discrimination and psychosocial-safety law. Legal literacy reframes compliance as care — ensuring the law is seen not as constraint but as compassion codified.

17. Reclaiming the Narrative Around Disability in Veterinary Medicine

Public messaging from regulators shapes what the profession believes is safe.

In Queensland, the VSB has a publicly available document “Concerns and Complaints about Veterinary Surgeons in Queensland: Information for Animal Owners”. Under the section, “Resolving Concerns”, it stated that the Board “ can consider concerns about a registered veterinarian’s professional conduct. Unprofessional conduct can include….. a physical or mental impairment that detrimentally impairs ability to practice or a severe substance dependence.”

On paper, this looks neutral. In practice, it conflates health with ethical failure.
To the public, it suggests disability equals danger. To veterinarians, it signals that disclosure is unsafe.

This is not semantics — it’s safety. Such framing deters help-seeking and entrenches stigma.

Regulatory bodies must develop narrative literacy — the awareness of how language shapes stigma and trust. Health-related issues belong in confidential, rehabilitative capability frameworks, not public disciplinary codes.

Transparency and dignity can coexist — but only when precision replaces prejudice.

From Courage to Culture

For decades, we’ve praised individuals for being “brave enough to disclose.”
But courage should never be a workplace requirement. Safety must be designed into systems, not demanded from people.

Fixing the culture around disclosure means dismantling the false binary between able and disabled, between safe to be open and safe to stay silent.
It means embedding psychological safety into every tier of veterinary life — from education to regulation, from leadership to law.

When trust is no longer conditional, disclosure will no longer be an act of courage.
It will simply be an act of belonging.

Interested in learning more? This blog deep dives into why disclosure culture may be the single biggest veterinary reform in a generation.