The meeting, titled New Horizons in Preventative Healthcare, brought together experts from practice, academia, and industry, to share insights into how the small animal veterinary community can improve preventative animal healthcare.

Jolian Howell, MSD Marketing and Technical Manager, says preventative healthcare is the mainstay of small animal practice, and evidence suggests there are opportunities to improve the way it is managed.

“Preventative health comprises many elements, and one aim of this meeting was to examine some of those individually to see where the needs are, with a view to delivering practical tools that can help to provide more effective preventative healthcare to pet owners.”

The meeting covered topics such as: emerging threats in enteric infectious disease, leptospirosis and CRGV research, vaccine use and protocols, consultations, disease surveillance and preventative healthcare in practice.

John Helps, Senior Technical Manager at MSD, says the summit is part of MSD’s continuing work in the preventative healthcare field, which includes an ongoing collaborative study into practice consultations with the Centre for Evidence-based Veterinary Medicine (CEVM) at The University of Nottingham.

“The Nottingham study is one avenue to inspire some really interesting approaches to structuring the consultation and to try and improve customer satisfaction, and this meeting helped to explore other areas we can work on.

“There is a lot of focus on diagnosis and treatment of disease, but perhaps one area that is somewhat neglected is the area of best practice around preventative healthcare. I think many practices do this very well but there is certainly evidence for room for improvement in the way we communicate and the way we speak about preventative healthcare.”

Mr Howell adds: “The meeting confirmed the real interest in how a practice consultation is delivered, and how preventative healthcare fits into that. It’s clear that practitioners want to do more in this area, and we are equally keen to help them understand how to do that better, using data and research, as well as business, marketing and communications tools.”

For more information, contact MSD on +44(0)370 060 3380 or [email protected]