In June we asked you to complete our Annual Members Survey to help us understand how we’re doing and where we should focus our priorities for the year ahead. Thank you to everyone who took part, this is what you had to say…
Over 90% of members would recommend BEVA membership to their friends and colleagues and you’ve told us that your journals, CPD and Congress are important benefits to you. We’re hearing loud and clear that you want to see more CPD aimed at established, ambulatory vets. We’ve already tasked our Education Committee with this, and as a result we’ve got a couple of new and exciting courses coming up towards the end of this year and in 2024 – we can’t wait to see you at them!
Another common theme throughout the responses was related to equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI). And we’re pleased to say we are already looking at this and have appointed Council Member, Sophie Eaden as our EDI Officer. Sophie has shared an introduction to EDI in this BEVA Quarter, do read it on page 22.
It’s great to see that over 80% of you feel aware and informed of the work we do to represent you to our regulatory bodies, Government and the equine industry. But it isn’t 100% so there is still room for improvement. Over the summer we’re making some changes to our website which will include new areas that provide updates and progress on the things we are working on.
As part of our efforts to attract students into equine practice we also asked what student members need from us. Students told us they want to continue to have access to talks and resources about getting into equine practice, advice for EMS placements and what life in practice is really like. We’ll be tasking our Careers Committee with developing our Vet School Tour programme for 2023-2024 as well as working with BSEVA to spread the message further.
Those of you who have downloaded the BEVA Buddy app are enjoying the convenience of having easy access to resources and the community feel of the discussion pages. If you haven’t downloaded the app yet don’t wait any longer, download it today by searching “BEVA Buddy” in your app store.
Once again, we’d like to say a huge thank you to all our survey respondents. The results were discussed amongst the BEVA Council at our 2023 Strategy Meeting at the end of last month and we will use them to inform our activities and projects for the coming year. We’d love to continue to hear from you, please do share further opinions via membership@beva.org.uk.