Expanding Group Clinical Board helping VetPartners to innovate patient care across UK and Europe
VETPARTNERS is growing its clinical communities across the UK and Europe to enable the group to progress care together.
We have expanded our Group Clinical Board, which meets every month online and once a year in person, as well as hosting study groups and meetings for our clinical community across seven countries.
The VetPartners Group Clinical Board, led by Dr Rachel Dean, is comprised of a Clinical Board lead in each country: Aline Rodts (Netherlands), Austin Donnelly (Ireland), Christine Wage (Germany), Francesca Bresciani (Italy), Maeva Roman (Switzerland), Susana García (Spain and Portugal) and Victoire Moucheboeuf (France).
The aim is to collectively innovate care together as a large group with 850 sites in the UK and Europe and 12,000 employees, and share resources and knowledge to deliver optimal clinical outcomes.
The Group Clinical Board works closely with a wide array of clinical interest and study groups, enabling people with similar interests to share their knowledge, skills, experience and expertise and provide support and mentorship.
The ongoing development of a Group Clinical Board is one of the advancements included in VetPartners’ Clinical Board Annual Report entitled Progressing Practice Together, which has just been published, highlighting key achievements and new initiatives in 2024, including:
- The growing clinical communities across the group.
- Utilising post-op coding within Practice Management Systems (PMS) to enable Quality Improvement (QI) work across the UK and extending into Europe. So far this has allowed data collection from more than 27,000 coded routine surgeries over four years, with 93% of patients experiencing no or only minor problems post-operatively in 2024.
- Expansion of VetPartners’ library of evidence-based clinical decision-making resources to support practice teams across the UK and Europe.
- Antibiotic purchasing across UK practices has reduced by 47% in kg per full-time equivalent vet, underlining a commitment to the responsible use of antibiotics amid the ongoing global threat of Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) to humans, animals, plants and the environment.
VetPartners Director of Clinical Research and Excellence in Practice Dr Rachel Dean said: “We are delighted to publish the VetPartners Clinical Board Report as it is a great opportunity to reflect on all the achievements of our people over the past year, and it reflects how passionate and engaged our teams are in the patient-centred care they provide.
“What makes this report extra special is that we are focusing on how we develop our clinical communities across the whole group and help different teams connect to discuss clinical cases, support each other and share new ideas on how we are going to innovate care moving forward.
“We are still very much focused on clinical Quality Improvement (QI) to help practices to progress care for our patients, clients and teams. Our QI work is now extending across the whole group when we are looking at our surgical outcomes and use of antibiotics. This will help us to understand what a great job we do and give confidence to our clients and our teams and, most of all, provide excellent care for our patients.
“We are also increasing our clinical research portfolio across many different disciplines across many different species, and we encourage people in practice to get involved in developing the evidence base.”
Francesca Bresciani, Clinical Board Lead in Italy, said: “I’m very positive and enthusiastic about the potential of our clinical community. A strong, united network with open communication is essential for making evidence-based medicine-delivered-care and continuous Quality Improvement an achievable reality in all veterinary practices.
“We are focused on providing our teams with comprehensive support, peer-to-peer collaboration, and targeted training to ensure we all feel valued and equipped to deliver excellent care. Seeing the growth of this community in Italy is encouraging.”
The VetPartners Clinical Board is also undertaking several major clinical research projects in the UK and the results are being shared with European teams to help progress care across the group which underlines the value of a larger network.
Project FEET explored how the whole mobility team – farmers, foot trimmers, vets and vet techs – manage lameness in cattle. Project DRAPES is trialling whether using disposable drapes in routine surgeries gave different patient outcomes. Project NURSE is addressing interest among equine nurses in developing their clinical roles and providing more client-facing services. Project WORMS recognises the need for vets and owners to work together to tackle resistance to worming products.
For media enquiries, please contact Amanda Little, VetPartners PR and Communications Director, at amanda.little@vetpartners.co.uk or 07970 198492