What is Restorative Just Culture?
Amanda Joy Oates from the Restorative Just Culture Foundation answers 'What is Restorative Just Culture?, as part of the RJC 2026 campaign. This is the extended answer, to complement her video on our social media platforms.
Restorative Just Cultures are organisational cultures that balance learning, accountability, and compassion to support open and respectful dialogue to enable safer veterinary practice. They foster trust, fairness, and forward-looking accountability, creating conditions where learning and innovation can flourish.
Grounded in restorative principles, they create the conditions where people feel psychologically safe to give feedback, raise concerns, question practice, and acknowledge mistakes without fear of blame or unfair punishment. Rather than focusing on who is at fault, Restorative Just Cultures focus on what happened, why it happened, and how harm can be repaired and future risk reduced or prevented.
When incidents occur, responses are guided by fairness and understanding rather than blame. This means:-
• Identifying who has been hurt
• Recognising and addressing harm
• Understanding the needs, experiences, and obligations
• Learning from error
This approach supports meaningful improvement while promoting restoration, healing, and safer outcomes for patients, teams, and organisations.
Restorative Just Culture aims to achieve at least four goals. These are:-
1. Moral Engagement: All interested parties have conversations about what the right thing to do now is, acknowledging that a patient, their carer, or caregiver has been hurt.
2. Emotional Healing: Acknowledging that in veterinary practices, when things don’t go to plan, there is not just physical hurt but also emotional hurt. The patient, carer, family, veterinary team, and others can face emotional hurt. Fixing or addressing emotional needs and feelings enables emotional healing.
3. Reintegration of the practitioner: Where possible, after harm has occurred, how are practitioners supported to get back to work and function so they can once again continue and care for their patients, feeling safe and supported to do so?
4. Organisational learning: Increasing the resilience of the veterinary team by having a deeper insight into the systematic issues that created or contributed to organisational difficulties or complex practices in real work.
Book your place on our online open course, Restorative Just Culture for Veterinary Practice
Register for the FREE webinar, co-delivered by Amanda Joy Oates from the Restorative Just Culture Foundation and VetLed. Happening on 11th March at 8pm GMT
Download our FREE Restorative Just Culture Guide - LAUNCHING SOON!
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