Just one hour of your time makes the veterinary voice even louder

One of the greatest joys of my work is when vets get in touch to tell us that they’ve seen or heard BVA in a story about animal welfare or the profession. ‘I was driving my car and a segment came on the radio about your ear cropping campaign’ or ‘I was reading the front page about animal sentience in the newspaper and saw the BVA comment’.

Some of these stories are light-hearted, quirky, or funny, while some go right to the heart of complex animal health and welfare issues, such as welfare at slaughter or veterinary certification. The BVA team works hard to ensure the voice of vets is heard in as many of them as possible, cutting through controversy or humour to deliver the messages that matter.

Many of you will have seen our Officer team in interviews and they do an incredible job representing the profession. But we also rely on every member of Team Vet to help us ‘sell’ the stories that matter to press, politicians, and the public.

With that in mind we’re hugely grateful to the members of the BVA Voice of the Veterinary Profession Survey Panel who give up an hour of precious free time each year to complete our Voice of the Veterinary Profession surveys. Statistics are an invaluable tool for grabbing the attention of mainstream media, for convincing politicians, and for painting a compelling picture of how welfare issues really affect animals and the veterinary teams who treat them.

Putting your responses to use

We’ve been conducting our Voice surveys since 2014 and the data has proved absolutely invaluable, adding tremendous power and conviction to our campaign and lobbying work. And this year we’ve put your survey responses to fantastic use.

• Ear cropping data from the Spring 2021 Voice survey came through just before the parliamentary debate on ear cropping, helping us to ensure the issue was high on the news agenda when the debate opened.
• Statistics from the July mini-survey helped us to promote a range of topics on sustainability around the COP26 summit and to launch our popular #GreenTeamVet sustainability pledge.
• And data from the Autumn survey played a key role in our #BigConversation on discrimination in the profession and helped us to get important messages out to the public about AMR during World Antimicrobial Resistance Week.

We would like to thank every member who took the time this year to complete a Voice survey and help strengthen the profession’s voice on these, and other, key issues.

Our next mini-survey launches in January and takes just 10 minutes to complete. Sign-up by Monday 10 January to take part or join the panel any time to receive future surveys.  To join the Voice of the Veterinary Profession survey panel simply login to MyBVA on the BVA website and subscribe via the ‘My Voice’ tab in your member dashboard.