Contextualised care, parasiticides and career development take centre stage at Congress and Expo 2025

20 March 2025

BSAVA Congress and Expo 2025 kicked off this morning at Manchester Central, with delegates flocking in for three days of CPD, networking and connecting.

Day one began with a session on Contextualised Care, looking into the role of collaborative care and the use of the whole team, particularly vet nurses and receptionists. Delegates suggested that the sector has been very good at “moving from paternalistic care to informative care”, with Paul Higgs, Chief Veterinary Officer at CVS, noting that it’s important to find out what matters to a client, and “closing the loop between doing it, and demonstrating that we’ve done it.”

An audience survey also identified peer pressure, fear of colleague judgement, graduate experience, knowledge of history/continuity of care, lack of societal understanding and clients changing their mind, all as key barriers to contextualised care. With recent events such as the CMA review, there’s notably been a damage of trust between clients and vets, but also with vets and clients, with a need to address this across the profession.

Another hot topic is sustainable use of parasiticides, with Andrew Prentis, Veterinary Surgeon and Visiting Fellow at the Imperial College London arguing that mass advertising of parasiticides to pet owners is inappropriate, during a session on safe, smart and sustainable prescribing.

Rose Perkins, Veterinary Surgeon and researcher at the University of Sussex, highlighted the growing evidence on the widespread environmental impact of pet parasiticides. Yet while both the RCVS Practice Standards Scheme and the joint policy position on the responsible use of parasiticides to which the BSAVA contributed, both state that a blanket approach to parasiticide treatment should not be taken, 37% of pet owners are subscribed to pet health plans, which typically include regular parasite treatments.

Andrew Prentis suggested five actions for safe, smart sustainable prescribing, including the stopping of distributing parasiticides to animals that don’t have parasites, developing monthly subscription schemes that don’t involve blanket treatment, and stopping using topical parasiticides.

However, Francine Fernandez from the Veterinary Medicines Directorate, emphasised the importance of a thorough risk assessment to balance environmental concerns with the need for effective parasite control in small animals, and fully understanding how changing any product usage could affect both animal and human health.

As part of the personal development module, Sophie Gilbert, a Veterinary Surgeon specialising in ECC, explained that understanding Human Factors and how the whole team can support each other with under stress, is the key to managing emergencies successfully.

Stevie-Leigh Egerton, Clinical Nursing Manager, emphasised the importance of preparation to reduce stress, help decision making, save time and improve patient outcomes. Difficult team dynamics can lead to medical errors, delayed treatments and incivility, which all significantly affect the outcome for patients.

A big theme from the ‘Career Progression for Veterinary Nurses’ session was imposter syndrome. It’s felt to be more prevalent in nurses than vets, with talks that the culture is now changing to value the knowledge and experience of nurses, and conversations between nurses and vets can help establish strengths and weaknesses and help each other out.

Further to this, Jack Peploe from Veterinary IT Services, gave insights on how to gain more time day-to-day by improving practice efficiencies. Systems that integrate payment processing directly with the practice’s management software and tools that can generate draft responses to emails can be huge time savers, as well as digitising managing and storing medical images, and a system of managing routine post-op checks. Transcription services are evolving, he said, and some can also send emails too. All of these tools let vets focus on patient care rather than admin tasks.

BSAVA Congress and Expo 2025 continues tomorrow with sessions on the CMA review, One Health, AI in Veterinary Care, and how to master difficult conversations.