Finding new ways to support our members

A few years ago, when I was Chair of BSAVA's Membership Development Committee (MDC), the membership category we were focusing on was recent and new graduates. We had noticed a dip in membership just after vets graduated. Some of this was inevitable but the drop was a little larger than usual and implied that this group did not feel they were getting enough from their membership. By then, the RCVS’s Professional Development Phase (PDP) had been running for a few years. I was the first cohort for whom the PDP was compulsory and I am now an employer of new graduates so I was familiar with the principles behind the concept and how it had developed. As a committee, MDC discussed what BSAVA could do to help this group of our membership and decided to make a resource which would run parallel to the official RCVS PDP requirements. We initially decided to focus on those areas where information was tricky to find. The first thing to do was some groundwork identifying the subjects we needed to cover and I am grateful to Will Walker, a committee member at the time, for his efforts in this. An outline structure was created and agreed and then it was costed out. Council voted it through and it was then up to MDC to run with it! A major project like this requires a lot of time and effort from the staff at Woodrow House, BSAVA HQ. Kate King joined the education team at just the right time. She took the PDP project up as one of her tasks and has worked tirelessly on the content and layout to create the resource you see today.