Standards and Advice: spring 2026 update

For a number of years we have kept an eye on the emergence of AI tools and considered, through the RCVS Roundtable in 2024, our responsibilities as a regulator in ensuring that the profession is provided with advice to enable safe and informed use of the tools, whilst maintaining professional and clinical judgement from the veterinary team. 

In October 2025 the Committee started to explore how best to assist the profession in using AI tools in everyday practice. The Committee compared the use of AI in a practice setting to other tools, such as clinical veterinary research and academic writing, and agreed that veterinary surgeons and veterinary nurses are welcome to use tools to facilitate care, however, professional judgement cannot be entirely outsourced to AI. The Committee were also mindful that any advice from the RCVS should avoid inadvertently limiting innovation. 

With the aim of future-proofing the advice, and to avoid creating additional, onerous obligations on the profession, the Committee agreed that advice for the use of AI in practice would focus on how to apply the existing principles of the Code of Professional Conduct and supporting guidance to the new technology. 

The Committee agreed the advice in April 2026, a summary of which is provided below:

• Professional and clinical decision making must not be wholly delegated to AI.
• Veterinary surgeons and veterinary nurses remain responsible for their decision to use the tool, and must think critically about how the output is used.  
• The person using the tool should have sufficient understanding of the subject matter.
• Client confidentiality and client rights under the Data Protection Act 2018 and UK General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) should be considered and maintained.
• Where AI tools are used generate clinical records, the output should be manually verified. 

The full advice can be found on the resources and updates section of the website. 

In October 2025, the Committee began a review of Chapter 13 of the supporting guidance to the Code of Professional Conduct which sets out expectations for clinical and client records in practice. 

During the six-month review, the Committee focused on ensuring that the guidance would be accessible to the profession and focused on the principles of keeping clear, accurate and adequately detailed records, as opposed to being overly prescriptive. 

As part of the review the Committee considered aspects such as: inclusion of guidance around GDPR; clarity regarding expectations for clinical vs client records; what type of information clinical and client records should contain; and, requirements when sharing records. 

To ensure consistency, the relevant paragraphs in Chapter 5 (‘Communication between professional colleagues’) around taking over a case and requesting clinical histories will be updated to reflect the agreed guidance in Chapter 13.

The Committee approved the new guidance at its April 2026 meeting. The revised chapter can be found here.