What chance of a review of the AHVLA's practices? - Veterinary Practice
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InFocus

What chance of a review of the AHVLA’s practices?

AT long last the tide seems to be turning. I have been banging on for years to anybody who would listen (and I have to admit there haven’t been many) about the dangerous path we have been on regarding the centralisation of the control of professionals working in the public sector.

I have said time and time again that unless we trust people to do their job and to behave in a professional manner, we will end up with nothing more than “technicians” carrying out tasks to a prescribed formula in the name of standardisation and accountability. The real reason for carrying out the task will be lost.

Hooray! At last somebody in a position of power has come to the same conclusion. The Professor of Social Work at the London School of Economics, Eileen Munro, has recently carried out a review of child protection and social work for the current Government. I heard her interviewed on the radio the other day. She recommended that some central control be removed from social workers to allow them to better use their professional expertise.

Child care professionals “should be accountable to how much they are helping children”, she said. “At the moment we’re judging them by how well they are managing bureaucratic processes.” Hooray again!

Too much prescription

She said that we need to design IT systems to match social workers’ practice whereas “at the moment we have an IT system that was designed centrally which changes what people can do at the front line”. She went on to say that there is “too much prescription on ways of working”, leading to “standardisation down to a minimum level”. Hooray for a third time.

What has all this got to do with us vets? Well, coincidentally I was talking with a friend the other day who works for what used to be called the State Veterinary Service and who admitted that she’d lost track of who she was now working for as the name had changed so often of late. And what she was telling me was almost an exact mirror of what Professor Munro was saying.

For a start she was telling me about Animal Health’s new computer system. The system has rather excruciatingly been named SAM, presumably a trendy attempt by the management to align themselves with that well-known and respected maker of contemporary TV programmes, DAVE. Oh, the irony of it all.

To add weight to Professor Munro’s point of view, my friend tells me that this computer system – sorry, SAM, (I can hardly bring myself to call it that) – has been designed centrally with no real understanding of how those having to use it do their work.

It apparently now takes two or three times as long as it used to to do the simplest of jobs, and entering data onto the computer inevitably takes far longer than the job itself. The software is nonintuitive, clunking, and repetitive, and no one who uses it on a daily basis appears to have a good word for it.

All of which is extremely worrying, particularly when bovine TB is still running rampant and the vets could be doing something rather more useful about it than tapping away at a keyboard, all at public expense.

The new computer system appears to be a complete waste of extremely valuable professional time and, just as importantly in these austere times, money; all in the name of … greater efficiency. You couldn’t make it up, could you?

All those old Soviet bloc leaders from the cold war days must be smiling broadly in their graves to see that the West has at long last seen the light and adopted their procedures. The “enemy within” has triumphed where the massed arsenals of nuclear warheads and MiG fighters failed.

Even more disturbing is that I’m told that anybody who raises doubts about the usefulness of SAM is quickly silenced by those above for daring to question its worth. It has become the proverbial “elephant in the room” and a white one at that, presumably because of the vast quantities of money it has already consumed. Or as they say, “We have a lemon, so we must make lemonade.”

Mushrooming manuals

Of equal concern is that the SVS instruction manuals detailing how the job is to be done have mushroomed beyond anyone’s wildest dreams (nightmares) and are so prescriptive that any possibility of using common sense or, even worse, professional judgment, is now seemingly non-existent.

Professor Munro’s warning that “too much prescription on ways of working” leads to “standardisation down to a minimum level” is a very pertinent one and I would suggest directly transferable from one public service to another. What a shocking waste of talent.

Animal Health has recently amalgamated to form the Animal Health and Veterinary Laboratories Agency – now doesn’t that just trip off the tongue! Many of those at the top (presumably those largely responsible for the creation of SAM and the current working practices that my friend tells me have taken morale amongst the vets to an all-time low), have quite understandably taken the opportunity to scurry for the exits with the bags of swag generously handed out under various Civil Service early departure schemes.

Keep watch

One hopes that because of the damage done to the State Veterinary Service on their “watch”, and for the sake of the public purse, they will not be reemployed after an indecently short period of time on an even more indecent consultant’s salary. Keep a watch out for this.

What I hope (and I am realistic enough to realise this is likely to be a forlorn hope) is that those who are left in charge will realise the terrible mistakes of the last few years, throw up their hands in horror, blame everything on those who have left, and start again with a clean sheet.

They could do a lot worse than look back to the time when the SVS was run by vets with a relatively small band of administrators and when vets were respected for their professional integrity and judgment.

Presentation and spin are a lasting legacy of the Blair years that would be good to dump at the earliest opportunity, along with working practices that reduce professionals to seemingly mindless technicians.

An invitation from those at the top of the AHVLA for Professor Munro to carry out an urgent review of its working practices and computer systems would be a very good place to start. I for one will not be holding my breath.

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