Leaders need support to combat retention issues, congress hears 

Veterinary leaders may be at risk of becoming disillusioned with the entire sector amid a lack of support for their roles, a senior figure has warned.

The stark message was delivered to VMG Congress delegates following the release of a new report that highlighted several major areas for potential improvement.

The group’s new leader called for the sector to go further in recognising the value of non-clinical career development to help address the issue.

But BVNA president Lyndsay Hughes argued that the potential for leaders to exit the sector altogether was a still greater concern.

Experiences

Mrs Hughes drew on her own experiences of becoming a head nurse only a few months after qualifying and revealed she knew of three others who were no longer registered because of their experiences in similar roles.

She said: “In a situation where we’re already struggling with retention, that is an even bigger problem. We need to do so much more.”

The discussion served as the formal launch of the VMG’s inaugural State of Veterinary Leadership report, in which slightly more than one-third of respondents (37 per cent) considered that they regularly contributed to advancing the field, while business planning and strategy were the areas with the weakest levels of understanding.

Delegates were urged to complete the group’s online skills assessment survey – on which the document is based – if they had not already done so, while it was also suggested that previous participants should be encouraged to repeat the survey after two or three years.

New VMG president Liz Somerville described the report as “exciting”, because of its identification of the areas where skill gaps exist.

Framework

She said: “We now have the framework and can take that forward.”

Former group president Richard Casey said the document showed where short-term efforts should be focused, while the improvement process would also require the organisation to look at its own record.

He said: “We’re on this journey just as much as everyone else in the room. Nobody is the finished article.”

The VMG is already working with the British Veterinary Receptionist Association on a career development programme, and Mrs Somerville praised the work being done in some vet schools to teach students about business-related topics within their degree programmes.

But she also argued that the sector needs to go further in seeing the value of non-clinical CPD, after one delegate who spoke from the floor called for specific percentage requirements to be introduced.

‘Conversations’

Mrs Somerville said: “We’d love to have more conversations with the Royal College about non-clinical CPD. That’s not going to happen overnight, but we need to be having those conversations.”

Meanwhile, Mrs Hughes said she was not surprised that the report had indicated several areas where nurses were less confident than leaders from different backgrounds.

She said many nurses end up in leadership roles by default as either the most experienced or even the only nurse in their practice, adding: “We put people in those positions and don’t give them any type of leadership training.”

She also argued that, while a greater emphasis on training was necessary, nurses also needed to more fully understand their own worth.

The VMG’s leadership assessment tool can be accessed online now.