Most veterinarians will tell you the profession is welcoming. Tripp Oliphant, DVM, says the same. But he also makes a sharper point: the profession being accepting and your hospital being accepting are two different things. And that difference shows up years later in who's still practicing and who isn't.
In a recent interview with dvm360, Dr. Oliphant, who is openly gay and married, reflected on how hospital culture influenced his earliest years in vet med. He was fortunate. His first position, a specialty emergency hospital, was unambiguously welcoming. He never had to wonder whether he was accepted. That freedom let him focus on something that actually mattered: becoming a better clinician.
How Identity Management Drains Clinical Bandwidth
Vet med, as a field, skews toward acceptance. Dr. Oliphant acknowledges this. But he also names something practices don't often reckon with: clients are a different story. Walking into exam rooms can mean coming out, repeatedly, without ever being asked. Clients notice. Some adjust. Some don't.
For LGBTQ+ veterinarians, this creates a tax on their attention. A portion of every workday goes toward scanning the room, reading the situation, deciding how to present. That's energy that doesn't go into the patient, the diagnosis, or the team.
What Dr. Oliphant describes shows up across many dimensions of belonging, not identity alone: when team members spend cognitive bandwidth on whether they'll be accepted, they have less bandwidth for the work. The practice that eliminates that question, for everyone, gets a more focused, more present clinician in return.
What Belonging Actually Does for Clinical Growth
There's a tendency to treat belonging as an HR problem or a retention metric. Practices measure turnover and point to culture as a factor. But Dr. Oliphant's story suggests something more specific: culture shapes growth, not just retention.
He was describing a hospital that helped him become a doctor, which matters more than a retention number ever could. Early career veterinarians, especially new graduates still developing clinical confidence, are forming habits and building competencies during years when the environment around them matters most. A hospital that requires them to manage identity alongside clinical demands is slowing that process down.
This applies beyond LGBTQ+ identity. New graduates navigating impostor syndrome, team members from underrepresented backgrounds, veterinarians with non-traditional paths: all of them carry an invisible load when the culture doesn't clearly signal that they belong. The ones who stay and thrive tend to find the environments where that load is lifted.
How Practices Build Belonging That Holds Up
Creating genuine belonging isn't about policies alone. It's about the daily texture of how teams interact, how leaders model inclusion, and whether staff see themselves reflected in the people around them. Practices that already track psychological safety and its effect on patient care have a head start, since belonging and psychological safety draw on the same underlying trust.
Dr. Oliphant grew up in a rural community where he didn't see veterinarians who looked like him. He found acceptance when he entered the profession. Not every veterinarian has that experience. Practices that actively create safety, rather than assuming the profession's general openness covers them, are more likely to develop the kind of clinicians who stay, grow, and invest in the team around them.
That starts with normalizing belonging as a clinical effectiveness issue in team meetings and performance conversations, not treating it as a culture talking point separate from patient care. Stay interviews that specifically ask whether team members feel comfortable being themselves at work surface problems that exit interviews never catch. Onboarding and mentorship structures deserve scrutiny too: new grads are forming professional identities during their first years, and what a practice communicates about belonging during that window shapes whether they stay. And when client behavior makes a team member uncomfortable, how leaders respond in that moment signals whether belonging is defended or just encouraged on paper.
Clinical development depends on belonging the way a building depends on its foundation. Practices that invest in real, sustained inclusion, the kind that actually removes the cost of belonging, get back a team that can direct its energy toward the patient and toward growth, rather than toward simply getting through the day.