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

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.