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Resilience in the rural veterinary sector: A call to arms

PROFESSOR CAROLINE ARGO, DEAN OF VETERINARY MEDICINE AND HEAD OF SCHOOL, SRUC

Veterinary and related professionals are essential to our natural and rural economies, promoting animal health and welfare, food quality and the sustainability of our remote communities. However, while strategically important, rural veterinary practises struggle financially and many lack capacity to service large but scantly populated areas.

The bottom line is that the veterinary profession fails to achieve self-sufficiency and notable skills gaps persist within it. For rural Scotland, these shortfalls are significant. The lack of UK vets is multifactorial. Concerningly, the UK remains dependent on the good graces of largely overseas vets to address gaps in priority areas such as, remote, rural and general practises, veterinary public health, livestock health and welfare, and government services. In light of Brexit, continued dependence on overseas manpower clearly carries significant risk. While these roles are fulfilling, require significant expertise and meet essential societal, ethical and legislative needs, the recruitment and retention of UK trained vets into these priority areas remains a challenge.

In his review of ‘Field Delivery of Animal Health Services in Scotland’, Prof. Charles Milne highlighted the negative and wasteful impact of the ‘constant churn’ of filling vacancies with staff of ‘limited, if any, practical, clinical and diagnostic experience’. The review points to the steady attrition of capabilities and experience in these areas and in Scotland, will ultimately ‘compromise operational effectiveness, particularly in any response to a disease incursion’.

This same constant churn of young vets in and out of clinical roles, creates unsustainable pressures on small practises and industry alike, opening age and expectation gaps between established practitioners and their workforce.

To date, predicted benefits from the ever-increasing numbers of veterinarians graduating from UK Vet Schools have failed to resolve the situation. Increased numbers of young vets have apparently been ‘offset’ by changes in the expectations of our new vets with respect to work patterns and environments. While UK Vet Schools produce graduates of the highest calibre, adding ‘more of the same’ at entrant level, doesn’t appear to be the solution to curbing the drain. It’s time for our professions to take charge!

While estimates of the average duration of a young vets stay within clinical practice range widely, most studies generally agree that this sits between two and seven years. For rural practises, this number is firmly at the lower end. Given the intensive and expensive five years required to educate young vets, this rate of attrition is clearly economically and functionally unsustainable. As a profession, we have a mission and responsibility to do things differently.

”In rolling out SRUC’s new School of Veterinary Medicine, we had the advantage of numerous reports defining the basis of poor resilience among today’s vets and our organisational legacy of expertise in the rural and agricultural sectors. We are determined to establish a school that had ‘addressing the challenges of the profession’ at its heart.

Vet Schools are often seen as ‘gatekeepers of the profession’. It’s time we took a closer look at realignment of our veterinary applicants, with both societal expectations and the realities of the job in the rural sectors.

Charles Sturt University, located in a region of Australia with similar priority pressures, led by example. Using ‘mission-led’ admissions processes, they clearly demonstrated the efficacy of setting ‘realistic’ academic requirements and taking a more holistic approach to identifying applicants with the aptitude and ability to succeed. Applicants selected from rural and farming communities returned there and forged long careers – this is something we’d like to embrace too.

There is an urgent need to widen participation in veterinary programmes. In pursuit of this, we have studied the secondary school provision in subjects at levels deemed essential for acceptance onto the majority of UK veterinary programmes. We have worked with the REACH team to identify and support potential veterinary applicants from a broad range of backgrounds including rural environments. By introducing an HND in Rural Animal Health, we will enable well-aligned but academically under-evidenced candidates to upskill to a level equal to our vet school’s requirements – or alternatively, provide them with viable careers as veterinary technicians.

Finally, perhaps the greatest ask, is of our own and associated professions. If we are to create different, more resilient vet graduates, we must ease their often career-ending transition from student to employee.

For us, this entails training home-domiciled students to exceed RCVS day one competences before the all important final, clinical year. We know that by conducting our clinical rotations in real world’ practises, working within functional veterinary teams and growing confidence, we will significantly ease their transition to the workplace – not to mention providing practitioners with the opportunity to work with potential employees.

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