Kindness in veterinary practice: clinical behaviors that support safer care.

Abstract

Veterinary medicine is experiencing increasing clinical complexity, workforce strain, and challenges in clinician-client-team interactions that can impair cooperation, decision-making, and care delivery. Although kindness is often viewed as a personal attribute, evidence from neuroscience, behavioral science, human healthcare, and emerging veterinary literature suggests that specific kindness-related clinical behaviors may influence how people experience and respond to veterinary encounters. This narrative review examines how behaviors such as agenda-setting, permission-based pacing, low-stress handling, nonjudgmental option framing, using the teach-back method, following up, and performing short team debriefs are intended to reduce stress and defensiveness, strengthen trust, preserve engagement, and support decision-making during difficult clinical interactions. It also outlines practical ways these behaviors may be incorporated into veterinary clinical workflows and identifies priorities for veterinary-specific research. Although causal relationships in veterinary settings remain to be established, this review offers a practical way to examine how quality of interactions may influence safety, care delivery, and workforce sustainability.