Notes from the BSAVA 2016 Congress

11.04.2016 The BSAVA 2016 Congress in Birmingham was an interesting experience. In the European scale, it is a very large congress, with around 200 exhibitors, an extensive collection of lectures and thousands of visitors from all over the world. At the congress there was so much to see. Around the congress venues I was able to meet some of our clients from Estonia and Finland and also discuss with some of our cooperation partners from all over Europe. At the exhibition there were also some very interesting discussions regarding the future cooperation possibilities in the UK. For example our cooperation with Vetlexicon will be starting in the next few days, and it was really nice to meet the people building the Vetlexicon service. I also was lucky to meet our guest blogger Chris Allen, author of the Vet School Diary and the twitter account @vetschooldiary. In addition to meeting people, I was also able to take part in some of the practice management lectures. Carolyne Crowe spoke about the subject “How to get the most out of your team”. She introduced the DiSC profiling tool as an effective tool for personality assessment. When you know something about your co-worker’s personality, there is the possibility to adjust your own actions. Adjusting your own communication methods to the preferred communication methods of the other party may be beneficial for both of you. Mark B. Hedberg's lecture was subjected to focus on measuring success. I expected to hear something about KPI numbers, but for me the message of Hedberg's lecture was, that the saying "If you can't measure it, you can't manage it" might actually not be true for some things. For example, you can't easily and objectively measure the good feeling of people at the clinic or at any working place, but it still is very important. At the lecture subjected "The impact of good design", Alison Lambert from OnSwitch reminded us about the importance of good design. Nowadays this affects not only our clients, but employees too. Some nice examples of good design were picked up from the Tube map of London. As a part of the lecture slides there was also a video from a discussion group, where one of the participants clearly noted, that choosing a veterinary clinic happens strongly based on online experience. Some quotes from that discussion group video: - "I Google for it and I try to see their on-line reviews". - "I go to the website and take a look at it. It needs to look nice". - "You are judging them by their website?" - "Yeah." These thoughts makes you think about the design of your practice website. Alison Lambert also notified us that in some countries even up to 30%-40% of appointment bookings happen on-line. In the UK the phone is still the number one method of appointment scheduling. On-line booking for vets is something that we started in Finland in 2007, and that is now available for everyone as integral part of the Provet Cloud. Alison Lambert also showed us some nice design examples from a Finnish veterinary clinic. I, being apparently the only person in the room who spoke Finnish, was surprisingly invited to assist Alison with the translation of the texts in these images from Finnish to English. I was happy to do so. One notifiable point for me was that the presence of social media was very strong at this congress. There was a giant Twitter wall installed in the lobby of the ICC. The hashtag #BSAVA16 was widely used, and almost all exhibitors were active on Twitter. Most of the lecturers were also able to be reached from Twitter. This year Provet Cloud was not yet joining the congress as the exhibitor, but we may well be there next year. We’ll be exhibiting for the first time in the UK at the London Vet Show in November 2016.