The Education Committee this year includes a group of highly motivated and hard-working Council members (Gayle Hallowell, Tim Mair, Kate Maxwell, Josh Slater, Renate Weller, Hannah Yeates and Lesley Young) and a representative from BVNA (Marie Rippingale), who have responsibility for overseeing BEVA’s CPD and education programmes.
Keeping our CPD courses up-to-date and relevant is a constant challenge, especially when one considers the diverse interests and experience of our membership, which includes students and veterinary nurses in addition to veterinary surgeons. We are always interested to hear from members who may have ideas and suggestions for future courses, and we routinely review feedback from previous meetings and courses in order to try to provide popular and high quality CPD. We recognise that there is increasing competition from other CPD providers, and that practitioners’ budgets for CPD are not limitless. For these reasons we are continuing to subsidise the costs of our courses to members, and we aim to provide unique CPD opportunities that most other providers cannot achieve. Wherever possible, we include practical components and case discussions in our CPD courses, and we recognise and support the recent initiatives from the RCVS to promote outcomes-based approaches to CPD. To this end, we are exploring ways of providing more blended learning methodologies, which include pre-course on-line content that allows more time for discussion and practical teaching during the meetings.
Our 2017 CPD programme is constantly evolving, but currently includes 39 courses in addition to our regional meetings and series of webinars. Plans are underway for the 2018 schedule, so if any member has ideas for new courses / speakers / venues, please get in touch. The 2017 Congress programme is also complete, and will include a number of new and exciting features – more information to follow soon!