Nineteen standing for six places on the Royal College

Is there enough laughter in
the profession these days?
Better animal welfare:
opportunity or obligation?
Is it time to give your entire
practice a health check?
Dental implants: are they
‘right’ for cats and dogs?
– page 13
– page 46
– page 59
– page 67
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For more information, please contact your local
Elanco representative or call 01256 353131
Further information is available upon request or to be found in the SPC relating to this product.
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Use medicines responsibly. www.noah.co.uk/responsible
Always seek advice on the correct use of this or alternative
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United Kingdom
Ireland
APRIL 2014 Volume 46 Number 2
VetsNorth 2014
Nineteen standing for six places
on the Royal College Council
WITH delegate numbers steadily
rising, the exhibition filling up rapidly
and the main sponsors – Dechra and
Norbrook – back on board, the third
Veterinary Practice Reader Update to be
held in Manchester – at the
Renaissance City Centre Hotel –
looks set to be the biggest yet.
The full programme is on page
11, the booking form and up-to-date
list of exhibitors on page 12. It’s all
also on www.vetsnorth.com.
The delegate rate for the two days
is £165 per person, which includes
access to the two clinical streams and
the veterinary forensic sessions;
refreshments throughout each day
and a high-quality buffet lunch. The
masterclasses cost £30 extra.
There are still places available on
the one-to-one consultation training
programme, entitled Winning clients
over, being run by the VDS.
n Top quality CPD in a superb
location – at great value for
money.
A RECORD 19 candidates – nine
men and 10 women – are standing
for the six places in this year’s
election for the Royal College
Council. Those successful will begin
their four-year terms at the RCVS
AGM on 11th July.
They are: David Bartram, David
Catlow, Camilla Edwards, Caroline
Foalks, Edward Gillams, Mandisa
Greene, David Leicester, Thomas
Lonsdale, Susan Macaldowie, Jacqui
Molyneux, Peter Moore, Sarah Oxley,
Sue Paterson, Christopher Pearson,
Katherine Richards, Janet Ritchie, Peter
Robinson, Christine Shield and Neil
Smith.
Five – Mr Catlow, Mrs Molyneux,
Mr Robinson, Miss Shield and Colonel
Smith – are current members of the
council. Mr Robinson recently replaced
Bob Partridge – who resigned “for
personal reasons” in late February – as a
result of being next in line after last
year’s election, when he came ninth.
The seventh and eighth placed
IN THIS ISSUE
The Manchester
Veterinary Congress
Thursday and Friday
26th and 27th June
Mercury
4
Imaging
24
Books
48
Cross-words
6
Dermatology
29
Equine pages
49
8
52
Viewpoint
Company profiles
31
Travel
Latest products
10
CPD
36
Business and finance 59
Perambulations
13
Livestock pages
44
Last words
67
candidates in 2013, Kit Sturgess and
Niall Connell, were given places on the
Council last July following the
resignations of Beverley Cottrell and
Catherine Goldie to take up appointed
places on the restructured disciplinary
committee.
While Mr Sturgess and Mr Connell
are not required to seek re-election this
time, Mr Robinson does have to.
Mr Catlow is seeking a second fouryear term, Mrs Molyneux (a past
president) a third, Miss Shield a fifth
and Colonel Smith, the current
president, a third.
Of the other candidates, all are
standing for the first time, except for
Tom Lonsdale who has
stood every year since
1997, coming a distant
last every time, and
Edward Gillams, who
stood in 2012 and came
10th.
Younger group
The Royal College points
out that whereas the
average age of all elected
Council members in
March 2013 was 56.5 (57
for women and 56 for
men), the average age of
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IL 2014
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this year’s candidates is 47 (45 for
women and 48 for men).
One sitting member of the Council,
Clare Tapsfield-Wright, has decided not
to seek re-election after serving two
terms.
Five candidates are standing for
election to the Veterinary Nurses
Council: Amanda-Jane Erne, Tammy
Ford, Hilary Orpet (a sitting member),
Amber Richards and Megan Whitehead.
Ballot papers were sent out by the
College last month and votes can be
cast either online or by post by 5pm on
25th April.
n Brief details of each of the RCVS
Council candidates are on page 15.
RETAIN
existing
clients
Professor Michael Day (left) will hand over the BSAVA
presidential chain of office on Sunday 6th April to Katie
McConnell – turn to page 16 for an interview with Mrs
McConnell; on the following pages is a preview of the
BSAVA congress exhibition – open from 3rd-6th April.
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6
VETERINARY PRACTICE APRIL 2014
CROSS-WORDS
Social media: can we live – or survive
in business – without it (or them)?
of the year. One of these was an
SPRING has finally arrived,
updated version of one I attended a
heralded at home by the
few years ago on social media and
appearance of a large amount of
general practice.
frog spawn in our pond and the
When I attended it I had never
appearance of a strange yellow
thing in the
sky.
GARETH CROSS
It is
welcomes the beginning of spring
and turns his thoughts to the
amazing how
world of ‘social media’, its place
the lift in the
in the modern world, and the
weather has a
danger of being dragged into
similar effect
neighbourhood gossip...
on people’s
spirits: staff,
clients and patients all feel better for it. used Twitter, Facebook or other
suchlike social media. I listened as
I remember on one farm visit I
happened to be there the day a large
veterinary marketing gurus explained
dairy herd was let out into the fields
the shiny appealing newness of social
after their winter incarceration in the
media and younger, keener IT experts
yard. The large black and white girls
explained their use to us all.
did a hop, skip and a jump into the
The version this year was attended
field looking more a flock of spring
by a colleague who summarised it as
lambs than 600kg milking cows.
follows: “Apparently we can’t live
The start of spring also makes you without it, but we in practice will all be
think about the year ahead and
too busy to do it for ourselves. Luckily,
though, we can pay the people
beyond. Many of us in the practice
lecturing to manage it for us.”
have been off on the first CPD trips
Vetsure
V
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policy
licy holders are incen
incentivised
tivised to
use one of the rrapidly
apidly g
growing
rowing number of
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accredited v
Isn’t it time to check
ck us out?
“I believ
believe
ve th
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at th
this
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odel will shape th
model
thee
future
ure of pet iinsurance
nsurance
in th
thee UK.
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Richard
Richar
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Edwards
ds MR
MRCVS,
CVS,
Partner
rtner Alphap
Alphapet
et V
Veterinary
eter
e inary
Clinics, Bo
Bognor
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Regis.
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To
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o learn
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email us
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[email protected]
info@v
etsure.com
www.vetsure.com
www.vetsure.com
There is no doubt about the
power, omnipresence and the influence
social media has on, well, social lives
of people. There is also no doubt that
if you have a mass market product to
sell and the resources to trawl and
process the social network data, you
will be foolish not to get involved, but
for vets I still am sceptical.
My personal test is to ask myself,
“Would I be interested if my dentist
had a Facebook page or Twitter
account?” or “If someone wrote
something good or bad about my
dentist on a social media site would
that make a difference to me or many
others?”
Obviously, good and bad news has
a value, but I think we are in danger of
getting dragged into the level of
neighbourhood gossip to promote
ourselves or defend ourselves if we
attach too much importance to social
media.
Before Facebook existed, how
many of us went to the pub every
night to talk loudly about how good
the practice was, or eavesdrop at every
conversation we heard in the
supermarket ready to chip in if we
heard anything about us we didn’t like?
We briefly had a Facebook page in
the practice but quite soon my
prediction that it would be abused by
nutters came true and we gave up on
it.
The social media experts in the
veterinary world remind me of the
first phase of alpaca keepers in the
UK. Everyone liked alpacas, they are
very appealing and lots of people
wanted them.
The next big thing...
They were to hobby farmers the next
big thing and suddenly people thought
there was some money to be made.
However, the only way to make money
is to breed and sell them to other
people who then end up with a field of
attractive but financially redundant
animals.
The social media gurus trying to
sell their services are like people with a
field full of pedigree alpacas: they’ve
invested their time and money in them
but realised that the only way to make
money is to sell more alpacas/social
media management services on to
someone else who will then end up
with a financial white elephant. Or
alpaca.
Whilst on the subject of alpacas, a
colleague on a recent DEFRA TB
testing course was informed that no
one knows how many alpacas are in
the UK, exactly where they are and, by
the way, they probably transmit TB.
I also asked him to press the
DEFRA staff on the current state of
affairs regarding the outsourcing of
TB testing to the private sector, to
pass on to readers. The only response
forthcoming was: “They never tell us
anyway, but it’s not happening any time
soon.”
One thing new media has proved
useful for locally is locating and
tracking the progress of stray cats. I
was accosted in the local newsagent
this week by a client to ask for an
update on one tom cat who has
become something of a local
Facebook celebrity.
He is a fine black specimen with
huge cheeks like Bagpuss and he
seemed to be running several homes at
once. Consequently, many “owners”
have started to track his progress
through our practice and then into the
local animal rescue centre via a local
lost cats Facebook page.
Harassment of vets
So good PR can be had; however, I
have also been looking into some fairly
distressing accounts of harassment of
vets by local communities using
Facebook and other similar sites.
There is at least one Facebook
group specifically dedicated to
“exposing” vets judged by individuals
to be below standard, with some very
hateful and damaging diatribes against
vets. Imagine a link to that popping up
on your Facebook wall.
A quick scan through some of the
UK veterinary forums shows that this
is not just a US phenomenon. The
amount of data going through social
networks has been described as a “firehose spray” of data.
Trying to tame social media to suit
you is a pretty huge task. It can just as
easily turn against you. I think for now
we will stick to providing a good
service to pets and clients and let
GCHQ deal with the data. We get
most of our new clients via the social
networks anyway, just not the virtual
ones.
After writing all that, however, I do
confess I use Facebook, LinkdIn and
Twitter: sparingly and mainly for clubs
and family stuff. However, my attitude
to it is still best summed up by Sandi
Toksvig’s introduction to the News
Quiz on Radio 4 recently: “Welcome
to the show, and for those of you
listening at home you can follow the
show on Twitter using the hashtag
#getalife.”
VETERINARY PRACTICE APRIL 2014
PROFILE
31
Service to benefit profession and clients
vets who have told me, ‘I thought of
Village Vets Group, a multi-centre
AS long-term partners, the UK
this years ago’. It was a concept that
veterinary profession and the pet
practice based around veterinary
works in other parts of the insurance
insurance industry have always
hospitals in North London and
market but nobody had really gone
behaved more like Mr and Mrs
Cambridge.
with it in the veterinary area.”
Punch than Darby and Joan.
With his business partner Brendan
Under the Vetsure system, pet
Outsiders may be surprised that
Robinson, Ashley began providing
owners are encouraged to use the
their relationship is based on
insurance policies for the practice’s
network of affiliated practices, mainly
protracted squabbling rather than
clients, drawn up in partnership with
mutual devotion when they have
an external underwriter. The idea took through their policies offering a lower
excess on procedures carried out in
created such a successful joint
off and they started offering policies
those clinics. The affiliated clinics
enterprise. Currently worth around
to clients of other practices: in four
receive a commission on all Vetsure
£800 million a year, the British pet
years they have built a network of
policies that their own clients take out.
insurance market is the
As for the clients, “They are
best developed in the
JOHN BONNER
quoted a price dependent on the
world behind Sweden and
speaks with Ashley Gray who runs a
Vetsure practice they use rather than
has enjoyed an annual
company set up to provide a ‘different
the postcode in which they happen to
growth of between 5%
but sustainable’ model of insurance
cover for pet animals
live. In this way we are able to offer
and 10% a year over the
the majority of partnered practices a
past decade.
cheaper price than those of other
Yet that growth in income has
more than 250 practices which have
providers offering premium lifetime
barely kept pace with the rise in the
been given the training needed to act
policies. This is particularly attractive
cost of claims and both partners
as appointed representatives for the
for practices surrounded by expensive
blame the other for the lack of
company under the authorisation of
competitors,” Ashley explains.
stability in the pet insurance market.
the FCA.
Vetsure requires its affiliated
So that is why Ashley Gray
By March 2013, Vetsure had grown
practices to share details of their
established Vetsure in 2009: he hoped
sufficiently to establish a sister
pricing system so that it can calculate
to build a sustainable model for
company to underwrite its policies.
its likely costs based on data on the
providing cover to meet the costs of
frequency of different treatments. The
Appreciation of needs
veterinary treatment and allow a
company’s policies also have an
A 1997 graduate of the Cambridge
cooling-off period for a sector in
emphasis on promoting preventive
veterinary school, Ashley had worked
danger of burning itself out.
in practice and in industry for Intervet care, an unusual feature since routine
“There was friction between two
flea and worming treatments are
and Hill’s and had an appreciation of
industries that should be working
usually excluded from most pet
the needs of both small animal
together. The insurers were
insurance policies.
practitioners and the wider business
complaining that there was crazy
community.
growth in veterinary costs while vets
“We realised there was an
Saving money
were grumbling that the insurance
opportunity out there, but to succeed
Ashley reasons that anything that will
companies weren’t paying bills and
their premiums were going up because we had to offer something different. If support good pet health is likely to
we copied the existing business models save money for the company in the
they were trying to reap bigger
we would have made the same
long term. “We would also like to be
profits,” he says.
mistakes and had the same problems
able to use the information held in the
experienced by other pet insurers.”
clinic’s practice management system to
External factors
He didn’t need to look far for that
help us underwrite policies that are
Certainly both sides may shoulder a
share of the blame for those problems new idea: the company simply adopted exactly tailored to the pet in question.
the directional care approach already
“We should be able to reward
but external factors also added to the
familiar to anyone who has taken out a people for keeping their pet healthy,
mix. In January 2005, the then FSA
policy with human healthcare
for complying with preventive health
(now FCA) took on the responsibility
providers like BUPA. “It wasn’t a
schemes and keeping the animal trim,
for regulating vets promoting pet
as obesity has such an impact on the
insurance. The complexities and added revolutionary idea, and since then I
have had several conversations with
pet’s health.”
responsibilities resulting from this
Having started off in the
change made many practices query
south-east of the country,
whether it was worth getting involved
Vetsure has a large number of
in advising clients on their insurance
affiliated practices in the Home
options.
Counties and a growing
More recently, companies with no
presence in the south-west,
background or understanding of the
midlands and north of
pet care market sniffed a business
England. After recruiting its
opportunity in the pet insurance
first practices in southern
market but soon found that those
Scotland, the company now has
profits weren’t forthcoming and duly
a sufficiently national network
quit.
to offer services directly to the
Some of those newcomers have
public rather than just through
stayed the course but the field is still
veterinary recommendations,
dominated by the established names,
and has recently updated its
although there is one recent arrival
Ashley Gray on his stand at the London Vet
website to provide a more
offering a serious challenge. That is the
Show last November with a map showing the
effective direct-to-consumer
business Ashley Gray set up when
locations of affiliated practices.
marketing tool.
working as marketing manager for the
Ashley Gray – and friend.
But having been set up by two
MsRCVS, Vetsure regards itself as a
veterinary company with a duty to
provide a service that benefits the
profession as well as its pet-owning
clients. So it formed a buying group to
which about two-thirds of affiliated
practices belong.
This provides discounts for
practitioners while the commission
that it receives gives the company
another income stream independent of
its insurance business. That is another
way in which the company aims to
sustain insurance premiums long term.
Ashley argues that closer
partnerships between practices and
their main suppliers are essential in an
increasingly competitive environment
in which small animal practitioners can
no longer rely on the loyalty of their
clients.
“The idea that your clients are truly
bonded to you is probably a dangerous
misconception. They behave just like
any other consumers. When they are in
front of their vet, they may say ‘I
wouldn’t think of going anywhere
else’. But the reality is that if they get a
glossy brochure for a spangley new
clinic coming through the door, then
that loyalty can sadly mean very little.
“The information we get shows
that people drift around when looking
for their pet healthcare. That will
occur less often if they are subject to
an enhanced excess but if this
movement is happening with our
policy-holders it will certainly be
happening with others.
“Vets need a third party to endorse
them and help drive business through
their doors and that is particularly
important for the independent
practitioners who are our typical
partners.”