Network helps develop effective veterinarian-farmer connections
"Farmers love to talk to students. It's a fantastic opportunity to learn to talk to clients in a more casual setting."
Diverse careers in veterinary medicine hold a particular interest for Melanie Barham. She began working in equine medicine but took an alternative career path to become coordinator of the Ontario Animal Health Network (OAHN) in 2014.
As a collaboration between the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs (OMAFRA) and the University of Guelph’s Animal Health Laboratory (AHL), OAHN comprises expert networks in food, companion animals and wildlife. The focus: Coordinated early detection, preparedness and response to animal health and welfare, through sustainable cross-sector networks in public health, food safety and production.
“We want to provide practical, timely info that veterinarians and producers can use on-farm to make better decisions for animal health and welfare,” says Barham. She says the networks have been particularly successful at translating data into useful information for veterinary practitioners.
Barham’s clinical background is pivotal in her role with OAHN in different areas of the animal health industry. It also helps as the network develops its social media and communications presence, finding a voice that veterinarians and producers trust. After graduating from U of G’s Ontario Veterinary College (OVC) in 2007, Barham completed an equine internship in California before joining a practice near Ottawa for a year. She then worked at an equine practice in southern Ontario before moving to OAHN.
Barham says she gained invaluable hands-on opportunities at OVC through fourth-year rotations among areas of clinical veterinary medicine, offered through the Veterinary Capacity Program (VCP) funded by the OMAFRA-U of G Agreement. She says particularly invaluable was an eight-week externship that began the fourth year of the DVM program. Relationship-building and communication skills stand out for her. The externship offers an opportunity to hone these skills not just with the client but also with the practitioner, she notes.
“Farmers love to talk to students. It’s a fantastic opportunity to learn to talk to clients in a more casual setting. You are there to do a procedure and you are there to be efficient, but you are also there to be part of that relationship.”
Building relationships is key to OAHN’s success. Many of the network co-leads worked in private practice initially and have maintained relationships with their respective groups. “I think their success has been built upon their ability to understand and interact with practitioners,” says Barham.
That’s echoed by Christa Arsenault, co-lead of the OAHN Swine Network with practitioners Mike DeGroot and George Charbonneau, who recently retired. Arsenault is one of a number of OMAFRA veterinarians who co-lead an OAHN network. Along with her co-leads, she organizes the network’s quarterly calls, triages information, and prepares reports for swine practitioners and producers. Before joining OMAFRA as a lead veterinarian in animal health and welfare, Arsenault worked in mixed animal practice on swine and with the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. That experience helped her to build relationships and learn about the industry — vital to her role with OMAFRA and OAHN.
Along with clinical training through VCP, practical experience is critical, she says. “The experience in practice allowed me to develop those relationships and to understand that specific industry. There are more and more vets taking on roles such as I have — veterinarians are stepping into roles related to antimicrobial resistance, in government roles, with vaccine companies, with industry, in academia and in research.”
Barham’s interest in diverse careers and her love of writing have morphed into the DVM Project (thedvmproject.com). Under the project, she posts blogs of interviews with veterinarians who have opted for paths outside of clinical practice. The blogs have been well received by veterinarians interested in alternative careers. “After I left practice, I saw some of the amazing ways that veterinarians are contributing to public health and to animal health and welfare, in so many ways that I never would have considered in practice or as a student.”
The Veterinary Capacity Program receives funding from Growing Forward 2, a federal, provincial and territorial initiative, and from the OMAFRA-U of G Agreement.
This article originally appeared in the 2018 Agri-Food Yearbook edition of Research magazine.
Written by Karen Mantel