Jeremy Phillipson, Amy Proctor, Philip Lowe and Andrew Donaldson

CHAPTER OVERVIEW

Veterinary practices are examples of knowledge-intensive business services, i.e. businesses that rely heavily on the high-quality clinical and technical skills of those they employ. This is, in fact, their key business asset: the way they market and deploy this asset is the foundation of their effective performance, and the way they nurture and renew it is fundamental to their future. In exploring contemporary challenges in veterinary business management, understanding the fundamental processes by which veterinarians develop their knowledge and pass this on is critical for effective professional practice and for the broader promotion of a knowledge-based economy.

At a time when the large-animal veterinary sector is under pressure to reassert its importance within the profession, this chapter explores the ways in which food animal veterinarians keep their knowledge of livestock health and production up to date in practice, and considers how this knowledge could be used to secure the role of the veterinarian in the future. While the chapter focuses on farm animal veterinarians as a case study, many of the issues raised here have wider applicability to veterinarians working in companion and equine fields, including the key themes of knowledge renewal and on-the-job learning, inter-professional working and the veterinarian as a key agent of knowledge exchange.

LEARNING OUTCOMES

After reading this chapter, students will be able to:

Introduction

Farm animal veterinarians are part of the knowledge-based economy in which professionals earn their livelihood by selling their expertise directly to clients. They play a key role in enhancing the skills and development of tens of thousands of farming businesses, and are required to keep their knowledge up to date in practice, as they face complex and ever-changing calls on their expertise. According to the standard formulation of knowledge transfer, ‘field professionals’ such as farm animal veterinary surgeons (but also agronomists, nutritionists, ecologists, etc.) act as intermediaries bringing science to the farm. In addition, veterinarians broker different types of knowledge apart from formal science. They also generate new knowledge and actively solve problems that they encounter as they strive to safeguard animal and public health. Veterinarians build up their own experiential and experimental knowledge in and through practice. They are not simply transferors of knowledge from others, but combine, translate and repackage information, and draw on their own accumulated field knowledge to tailor it to the circumstances of the client. Veterinarians thus act as both agents of knowledge exchange and practical problem solvers. To equip them for these roles, and to facilitate more effective knowledge exchange strategies, it is vital that new graduates not only have a clear understanding of these everyday knowledge practices, but also understand their wider significance as a valuable asset and marketable product in an increasingly competitive business environment.

The chapter is structured as follows. First, we examine the underpinning knowledge systems of veterinarians before exploring the processes through which this knowledge is formed and renewed, with a particular focus on the importance of field-generated knowledge. We then consider what veterinarians gain in terms of on-the-job learning from their interactions with colleagues, clients and other professionals. We conclude by exploring the role of practising veterinarians in knowledge exchange strategies for animal and public health, and consider how their field-generated knowledge could prove critical to securing their role in the future.

This chapter reflects on recent research carried out by the authors exploring the composition of field expertise and the role of farm advisors in knowledge exchange. ‘Science in the field: understanding the changing role of expertise in the rural economy’ was an Economic and Social Research Council-funded research project which ran between 2008 and 2011, and investigated how farm advisors such as land agents, vets and ecologists could be an important link in bridging the gap between scientific research and land management practice. The project involved in-depth face-to-face interviews with advisors, their professional associations and farmers, as well as ethnographic work, including work-shadowing of advisors going about their day-to-day work and observation of training and professional development activities. We present the findings from this research in the form of direct quotes taken from the interviews. All quotes used in the text are from interviews with practising veterinarians unless otherwise stated (these have been anonymized to maintain confidentiality).

The knowledge systems of field veterinarians

The Foresight Report on the future of food and farming in the UK identified the improvement of advisory services to farmers, land managers and food producers as a top priority in tackling the challenges of food security (Foresight, 2010, 2011). Changing commercial and legislative pressures on farmers create a need for up-to-date professional advice. However, concerns have been raised over the capacity of the agricultural advisory system to incorporate the latest insights from science (Oreszczyn et al., 2010; Van Crowder and Anderson, 1997). In animal husbandry, the requirement to increase productivity, while at the same time protecting the environment and animal welfare, necessitates continuous improvements in the skills and knowledge applied to livestock management under veterinary advice and direction. Furthermore, as government hands over more of the responsibility for managing animal health and disease risk to the agricultural industry, vets have to rethink the services they provide to their customers. Veterinary work can be conceptualized as a suite of services for livestock and food producers, including knowledge transfer, evaluation and planning. Knowledge management and getting expert advice to where it is needed are absolutely critical to the effectiveness of risk management and responsibility sharing. The new external challenges facing farming and food production (e.g. climate change, potential shifts in disease patterns, economic and energy concerns, and an emerging policy focus on food supply and risk) place a premium on knowledge that is up to date, authoritative, practical and targeted. Veterinary graduates qualify with an impressive knowledge and skill set, but there are questions concerning the extent to which professional and lifelong learning skills are integrated into the curriculum (May, 2008). In this chapter we explore how veterinarians maintain their knowledge, skills and expertise once their formal training has concluded and they enter professional practice.

When asked what formal knowledge updates they need to draw on in their work, vets refer not just to scientific knowledge but also to professional knowledge, such as that concerning professional standards and conduct, and regulatory knowledge, concerning policy or guidance documents, and new legislation impacting the profession (as illustrated in the right-hand side of Figure 9.1).

Professional associations are the most important source of all three types of formal knowledge. Practising vets expect their professional associations to filter out and synthesize scientific and regulatory developments relevant to their work. The professional channels used for knowledge updating include programmed continuing professional development (CPD), websites, publications, conferences, events and meetings of specialist divisions. Veterinarians also update their knowledge through other channels including training and information provided in-house or by sectoral bodies like the National Farmers’ Union, the Agricultural and Horticulture Development Board (via levy bodies like EBLEX, the organization for the English beef and sheep meat industry, and BPEX, the organization representing pig levy payers in England), and through private companies, particularly veterinary pharmaceutical firms. Books, journals, magazines, circulars and the farming press are also important as key knowledge sources, as is the Internet (via reference sites such as PubMed).

The formal professional, regulatory and scientific sources veterinarians draw upon do not, however, fully reflect the range of ways they keep their expertise up to date and problem-solve. Advisors actively broker a range of different types of knowledge, besides formal science, including generating knowledge themselves through learning on the job. For veterinarians, great significance is placed on this field-generated knowledge (see the left-hand side of Figure 9.1). Therefore, we need to rethink traditional understandings of their role as simply intermediaries of formal knowledge.

The significance of field-generated knowledge

As agents of knowledge exchange, veterinarians relay information and expertise to farmers, much of which is drawn from professional, regulatory and scientific sources. However, veterinarians are not simply transferors to their clients of formal knowledge from scientists or other experts; they are also agents of knowledge application, adaptation and practical problem solvers. As a result, they are able to produce interactively distinctive and specialized field knowledge.Veterinarians’ field knowledge comprises both experiential and experimental knowledge. Experiential and experimental knowledge are derived from observation and intervention in practice; they are related in that they both stem from ‘direct experience’ (Fazey et al., 2006). These forms of knowledge become implicit through an ‘intuitive process, based on substantial, long-term and reflected experience’ (Baars, 2011, p. 602).

Experiential knowledge involves learning through personal observation of what works and what does not. It is expertise derived from example and trial and error, and is refined through replication and iteration, case by case. It is, essentially, learning about what works in specific contexts, often intuitively so, and is seen by practitioners as crucial to the formation and renewal of field expertise. Some veterinarians described, for example, how they learnt from the mistakes they had made in the early years on entering practice:

In interview, veterinarians described how they also learnt through replication and refinement of different techniques and approaches:

In addition, veterinarians also utilize a different source of field knowledge – experimental knowledge – generated through deliberate interventions in the field. This experimental knowledge derives from problem solving, with veterinarians systematically trying out different approaches. Vets try things out in a range of different ways. In our study, this included, for example, informal investigations involving the fieldwork of testing, observing and monitoring:

Veterinarians also described a range of experimental activity. Much of this involved informal experimentation such as approaches and attitudes to administering drugs:

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