How to achieve contextualised care: insights from the veterinary sector and pet owners

Contextualised care is a way of delivering veterinary care that is adapted to the needs and circumstances of the individual animal, its owner and the wider context. It is a relatively new term for something that many feel has been happening in veterinary practices for decades.

"Contextualised care to me is delivering veterinary medicine that takes into consideration all aspects of the client’s needs, the owner’s needs, things like finances but also things like how tolerant the patient is to daily medications, whether they travel well, how able the owner is to administer medications.” - veterinary surgeon (interview)

However, the way that veterinary care and wider society have changed over recent years has made contextualised care more difficult to achieve. For example: ​ 

• advances in diagnostic and treatment options  
• rising costs of veterinary care  
• shifting attitudes to animals and increasing numbers of new pet owners 
• changes in the way that veterinary teams work.​ 

In 2025, RCVS Knowledge set out to gather insights from pet owners and people working across the veterinary sector to understand what could support the delivery of contextualised care. Working with Kaleidoscope Health and Care (a research and evaluation organisation with experience in human healthcare), we undertook mixed-methods research to investigate what contextualised care looks like in practice, what are the barriers and facilitators to its delivery, and what needs to happen to support contextualised care now and in the future.  

More than 1,000 pet owners and people working in the veterinary sector contributed to our research, giving us their views on what is currently working and what more needs to be done to support the delivery of contextualised care.  

The insights we gathered from this research have informed a contextualised care roadmap, which summarises the key findings of the research and presents practical, evidence-informed recommendations about how to support the delivery of contextualised care. 

The research report and roadmap will be available to download from 2pm on Thursday 6 November. Please register for our launch webinar to hear all about the research here. 

Key findings

The research found a groundswell of support for a contextualised approach to veterinary care, with strong agreement about the benefits of this approach for improving trust between pet owners and vet teams and improving the quality of care.  

The research suggests that, in many cases, good contextualised care is already being delivered, with 45% of veterinary professionals reporting facing very few barriers to contextualised care, and 45% of pet owners reporting having no barriers to receiving personalised care for their pet.   

However, many vet team members and pet owners faced barriers to contextualised care. For veterinary teams, barriers included: 

• lack of continuity of care 
• difficulty communicating about the costs of veterinary care 
• feeling most comfortable when providing ’gold standard’ care 
• standardised protocols and financial targets 
• fear of regulatory scrutiny, complaints and clinical failure, driving defensive medicine.  

For pet owners, who reported prioritising quality of life for their pet above everything else, the barriers were around the emotional aspects of making decisions about care. They reported feeling emotional when their pet is unwell, and guilt when being unable to afford all the treatment options. Many reported a lack of transparent communication around costs. 

Recommendations

Concerted action is needed from across the veterinary sector and pet owners to support the delivery of contextualised care. Everyone – including veterinary teams and educators, regulators, veterinary associations, veterinary practice owners, publishers and funders, and pet owners themselves – has a part to play.  

Based on the findings of the research, there are five broad areas where concerted action is needed to support contextualised care: 

• professional leadership 
• veterinary education 
• practice support 
• evidence and research  
• pet owner empowerment. 

We will be working with colleagues across the veterinary sector to identify ways to embed these recommendations and support the changes needed to achieve contextualised care.

Register for the report launch webinar