8 Apr 2025
Former head of the BVA Daniella Dos Santos discusses her veterinary journey and IVC Evidensia’s latest venture to help future clinicians
Vet Times
Job Title
IVC Evidensia's training centre at Blaise in Birmingham.
Becoming president of the BVA was a huge honour for Daniella Dos Santos.
The fact her tenure involved helping steer the veterinary profession through its toughest time in living memory, the COVID-19 pandemic, made it doubly rewarding.
On leaving, she stepped into another pivotal role: UK director of professional culture at IVC Evidensia.
It is a stellar career trajectory, but with five attempts required to get into vet school, it is also one that so easily may never have started.
The first in her single-parent family to go to university, it took an extra degree and a real fight to reach the RVC, before graduating in 2012 at the age of 27.
Having battled to forge her own career pathway, Daniella is fired with a passion for seeing others thrive, achieve and progress.
In her new role, Daniella has already spearheaded a flexible working policy that has transformed the lives of thousands of vets and nurses. Now, having created the concept one year ago, she witnessed the opening of IVC Evidensia’s first training centres in March. Purpose-built and state of the art, they will provide unrivalled support for staff – and eventually the wider profession – at every stage of their career.
Daniella said: “Being BVA president during COVID was the most all-consuming, challenging, but rewarding year of my career. At times, it felt like I had the whole profession on my shoulders.
“I did Sunday webinars every weekend and I knew hearing me explain where we were was helpful to people in a really isolating time.
“I came out of it feeling I’d made a difference to all our members.”
She added: “Leadership is about being authentic and approachable, so you can find a way forward.
“It’s led to my job now. I love animals, but I love people more.”
That love of people, and ensuring they are both happy and productive, was right at the fore when she joined IVC Evidensia, Europe’s leading veterinary employer, with her role now involving responsibility for all the learning and development.
Daniella (pictured) hit the ground running with the implementation of the flexible working policy. It was part of a massive culture change that has had demonstrable benefits for both staff and the business. A subsequent proficiency mapping exercise looked at which elements of the job first opinion vets were less confident or comfortable with.
A very similar pattern emerged across the whole country, with specific topics raised including ophthalmology, abdominal surgery and echocardiography.
Daniella said: “I started thinking that we are such a far-reaching organisation with so many phenomenal people, so how do I facilitate the sharing of knowledge and skills?
“I had this idea: everyone has to do CPD, we have identified there are gaps and we also have this huge Graduate Academy programme with 300-plus graduates every year that need practical training.
“So, I thought there must be a way we can do this, which is where the idea for the training centres was born. It will enable us to upskill our clinical teams, our graduates and anyone who joins us to have a career pathway, where they can start and finish their career with us.”
The training centres, announced at the Leaders’ Forum last May, opened in March.
One is based at Vets Now’s Penguin House support office in Dunfermline, the other at the state of the art Blaise Referral Hospital, which opened in Birmingham in late 2023.
The specifically chosen locations mean the facilities are within easy reach of vets and nurses from across the UK, while the Dunfermline centre became the first facility in Scotland to provide a broad range of CPD disciplines. They are fully staffed, with a registered veterinary nurse as a training centre coordinator in each one. They have wet lab facilities for practical training, and high-tech audio-visual equipment, including cameras that can look down to give a birds-eye view of procedures. Seminar facilities with teaching classrooms are also present, and the aim is eventually to stream proceedings to help accommodate hybrid learning.
Instead of hiring venues and external speakers for the Graduate Academy, training will all be done internally through expertise from within IVC Evidensia.
Daniella said: “The courses are free for all our staff. All of our skills will be one, two and three-star. You can start at one star to get your basics right, do two stars to develop more skills and then in three stars you’re really proficient.
“Or you might have a caseload change at your clinic that means you want to learn more about the particular patients or cases you are seeing.
“It’s about continuous development. If you go back to practice and in six months’ time you feel like you’ve lost confidence, you can go back and do it again.”
While the courses are initially for IVC Evidensia teams, the desire is to share the knowledge with the rest of the profession, so members of the profession from outside IVC Evidensia will be able to book from later this year.
Daniella said: “We have such phenomenal people with such incredible expertise within our business.
“We want to be able to share that to make sure that a pet, wherever they are and whoever is looking after them, gets the best care they can get.”
While the training centres are a real sea change in the learning and development approach, Daniella insisted they are far from the end game, and much more is to come. London-based at present, they are just one, albeit pre-eminent, part of her busy and ever-changing schedule.
Daniella is also one of the hosts of IVC Evidensia’s Beyond the Clinic bite-sized podcast. Her small animal contributions can include anything from how to manage seizures, whether you should be using antibiotics in gastrointestinal diseases, and how to have difficult conversations.
She said: “I find it incredibly fulfilling, and I enjoy going to work every day. I don’t thrive on routine.”
Daniella’s love of people more than pets, which she concedes may sound strange coming from a vet, is what will continue to drive her.
She added: “As a vet, I can’t do my job properly unless I have good relationships with the animal owners, good relationships with my team members and also the local community. So, what drives me is building those relationships and that trust.
“This job helps me change the working life of so many vets and nurses, so they all feel the same passion I do for the profession, and all enjoy their work as much as I did.
“Ultimately, if they do that, the pets under our care end up with healthier, happier lives.”
