‘Part of the team as opposed to watching from the outside’: Critical incident study of autistic veterinary surgeons’ workdays

This publication is included in the Autistic Autism Scholarship Project. one author of this publication is identified as autistic in the project.

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Pickles, K. J., Houdmont, J., Smits, F., & Hill, B. K. (2024). ‘Part of the team as opposed to watching from the outside’: Critical incident study of autistic veterinary surgeons’ workdays. Veterinary Record, 196(4), Article e4957. https://doi.org/10.1002/vetr.4957

Publication date: 2 Dec 2024 Added to AutiHub: 6 Jul 2026 Type: Article Article language: English
Publisher source (DOI) Full text OpenAlex source

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Authors

Publication authors
4
Publication authors identified as autistic
1 / 4 (25.0%)
  1. Kirstie J. Pickles *
  2. Jonathan Houdmont
  3. Femke Smits
  4. Bradley K Hill

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Autistic individuals experience differences in sensory processing, communication and executive function, which may affect their experience of the workplace. We investigated UK-based autistic clinical veterinary surgeons' experiences to establish contributing factors to a good or difficult workday. METHODS: Purposive sampling was used to conduct semi-structured qualitative interviews with 15 autistic veterinary surgeons. A critical incident technique was applied to explore the characteristics of a good and a difficult workday. Reflexive thematic analysis was used to identify recurrent themes and sub-themes in the narratives. RESULTS: Five major themes were identified as contributing to a difficult workday for autistic veterinarians: professional interactions, feeling out of control, the physical environment, role-specific challenges and self-doubt. Four overarching themes were identified as being associated with a good workday: positive interactions, feeling in control, having enough time and a sense of achievement. LIMITATIONS: As this is a qualitative study with a small number of participants, the extent to which these findings reflect the experience of the wider autistic veterinary surgeon community is unclear. CONCLUSION: Strategies to mitigate the effect of the most cited factors leading to difficult workdays, centring around neurodiversity awareness of colleagues and control of work, are likely to be helpful to autistic veterinary surgeons.

Bibliography cited by this reference

Cited references are imported from external metadata sources when they are available. The list may be partial.

Cited bibliography overview

These indicators describe the bibliography cited by this publication. An author name is counted each time it appears in one cited reference, so the same person can be counted more than once. Names not yet linked to an author already present in AutiHub are treated as unknown, not as non-autistic. Last computed: 23 Oct 2026 07:41.

Cited references
31
With a DOI
24
Without a DOI, from raw bibliography text
7
4 / 31 (12.9%) cited references include at least one author identified as autistic.
References with data to complete
4 / 31 (12.9%)
References with detected author names
27 / 31 (87.1%)
Without detected author names
4
Without a structured title
4
Without a stable identifier
6
References with raw author names still to review
4
References with external metadata lookup issues
0
These indicators apply to cited references displayed on this page, after technical duplicates have been merged. A reference without a DOI can still support author statistics when a title and author names are available.
Author names detected in the cited bibliography
96
From DOI or external metadata
96
From validated raw bibliography text
0
Raw names already validated
0
Raw names still to review
4
41 / 96 (42.7%) names are linked to an author already present in AutiHub. 55 / 96 (57.3%) names are not yet linked.
Names linked to a person identified as autistic
12 / 96 (12.5%)
Calculated across all author names detected in the cited bibliography. Among names linked to an author already present in AutiHub: 12 / 41 (29.3%). Distinct people identified as autistic: 10 / 91 (11.0%).
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