25 Jun 2024
Outlawing of the breed this year brought additional pressures to sector, led to disagreements in teams and saw some at the centre of abuse from angry owners – so having policies in place is key.
Paul Imrie
Job Title
Image © Syda Productions / Adobe Stock
Practice leaders have been urged to plan now so they are not dealing with the next XL bully-style ethical challenge “on the fly”.
The outlawing of the breed this year added additional pressures to a sector already reeling from recruitment and retention issues, and the scrutiny of competition regulators.
Not only have veterinary practices had to deal with an influx of animals for neutering or, in some instances, euthanasia, but at the eye of the storm some handled abuse from XL bully owners.
Implementation of the legislation added directly to workloads, but also presented challenges in practice teams where members held differing moral or ethical views about the new legislation.
The XL bully situation was the jumping-off point for a debate at BVA Live this month on ethical decision-making and conflict resolution.
While not going into specific instances in the session, Rosie Allister, consulting manager for Vetlife Helpline, said there had been “real tension in some veterinary teams around some of the ethical issues” surrounding XL bullies.
And she and other speakers said a strategy and policies were important to have in place for dealing with similar scenarios in the future.
RVN Hamish Morrin, consultant for Vet Values, said: “Dealing with ethical challenges when you’re trying to balance your personal views with wanting to support the people in your practice, wanting to support your clients, wanting to do right by the regulation, is a hard thing to do, and it’s much, much harder if you have to do it on the fly, when someone brings an animal to you.
“It is perhaps easier that we have these conversations before. It is very difficult to make these decisions when the thing is right there in front of you, when you are under pressure.”
Dr Allister said: “There is a huge amount that you can do as a leader or as a team to prepare for difficult things.
“One of the key things that you might be doing in preparation, if you know your team is going to be facing something potentially difficult as a leader, is thinking about how you communicate in a balanced way.
“You might think policies and procedures aren’t going to help with something difficult ethically, but actually, they can provide a really good framework for discussion.
“If you co-develop policy by listening to people’s views, then you can provide a framework that can help people, because one of the things that professionals often do in a difficult time is go to ethical frameworks that give them guidance on what to do.”
Mr Morrin agreed. He added: “It is so much easier to do this away from the heat of the moment and talk about, ‘what do we want to do when this happens?’, and have people feed in when it’s not an emergency and you’re not feeling that rush of emotions.”
Mr Morrin added that having someone on the team who had done some ethical training was part of the RCVS Practice Standards Scheme, and human medicine had some useful models that could aid practices to compile a framework for dealing with ethical dilemmas.
Organisations such as the BVA were also highlighted by the speakers as being able to provide practical advice and support on setting up frameworks for dealing with ethically challenging issues.
