Victor Boyhan on veterinary nurse recruitment and council change

Thank you Cathaoirleach. First I want to welcome you all here today and thank you for coming. I suppose I'm just looking at the press release that announced this meeting today and your arrival as people who are coming before the committee and we've got to go back and stay focused on what is our task. The topic is recruitment and retention of veterinary nurses. That's the simple topic for debate here today. So it's the recruitment and the retention of veterinary nurses and I'm going to stay pretty focused on that. I suppose the first thing I want to ask is the relationship between the Veterinary Ireland and the Veterinary Council of Ireland. Can you in short, one person on either side here, in one quick sentence, tell me what is the relationship and secondly, is there dual membership of both organisations? Yeah, so Veterinary Ireland is a registered trade union on behalf of private veterinary practitioners in Ireland. Some of our members could be members of the Veterinary Council or they may not be because Veterinary Ireland membership is voluntary whereas every vet in Ireland, every veterinary nurse who wants to practice have to be registered with the Veterinary Council of Ireland. So they would have everybody registered. And what's the comment in terms of the Veterinary Council, sorry, the Veterinary Council? The Veterinary Council is the regulator for veterinary practitioners and for veterinary nurses. So that means if you want to practice as a vet or as a veterinary nurse in Ireland you must be registered with the Veterinary Council on education and training and so on. That clarifies that. Okay, and thanks for that clarification. I think that's an important one for people listening in here. They wouldn't necessarily know what the relationship was. They might have thought you were two similar organisations doing the same type of thing. But there is a distinct difference and I think that's important. I want to welcome the Veterinary Council of Ireland's report, the Workforce Equipment Report which we had a look at and there are seven key objectives that you've signed up to and agreed. And interestingly enough, the first one is about a commitment recommendation to promoting the role of veterinary nurse. But I didn't pick up, Mr. McDermott, from your contribution a heavy emphasis on that, given that your first key objective in the Workforce Planning Report that we have sight of here today. So you might just for a moment talk on that, but more importantly I'd be interested in hearing, I don't know, Emily or Alan, I think both of you are veterinary nurses and perhaps I'd like to direct my question to you because you're on the cold face of it. You are veterinary nurses and so can you tell me or tell the committee through my questioning here, are you comfortable with the level of commitment and progress and do you think it's fast enough and timely enough in terms of this key objective which is recommendation number one, promoting the role of a veterinary nurse? So Emily, can we start with you? What's your take on that? Yeah, I mean veterinary nursing is a relatively new profession as it is. Our first graduates were in 2008, so we have made a lot of progress generally since then and the commitment of the council is definitely there in terms of implementing the recommendations from the Workforce Report. I think the council has seen that the main issues affecting nurses, some of them apply to vets and some of them also affect the welfare and health of our patients. So it's definitely something that the committee is really, or that the council is committed to and in kind of in recent years since this has happened, we've added external nursing members to our committees to add to the nursing voice within the Veterinary Council and a number of actions have been taken. They are in progress, but yeah, there is progress. And just continuing on with Alan, but also you might comment, you know, out of, you have nine members in the Veterinary Council, I think you've one veterinary nurse. It struck me that that perhaps is part of the problem. That's only my view, but can we just hear from Alan first, but in terms of that, I mean there was one nurse on the Veterinary Council. Yeah, I think that's a very telling figure and have you a view or comment on that and I'm asking you that. Yes, I would agree that we should have more than one nurse on the Veterinary Council and we are in talks in relation to adding a second nurse to the council as well. And you'd see the benefits of that. Absolutely, yes. That's great. Yeah, I would also like to elaborate that we do have a veterinary nursing committee as well who have five veterinary nurses on that and we're always trying to increase the scope of what the veterinary nurse can do and we have just added in recently about ultrasonography that the nurses are able to do an ultrasound on a patient as well. So we're always trying to improve the scope of the veterinary nurse to retain our veterinary nurses here in Ireland. So my takeaway from that is you think it would be more beneficial to have additional on the council. I think that's a really important sharing and are you happy with the pace of change within the Veterinary Council in terms of the focus on what we're here to talk about today is the recruitment and the retention of veterinary nurses. Yeah, it goes back to the comment in relation to that we are in talks about adding a second nurse onto the council. We don't have any date of when that will happen but hopefully in the near future with the communication that we're having that in the near future we will have a second nurse on the council. That's great. Mr. Kearns. Yeah, could I just clarify that about the numbers. So you're absolutely correct. There are nine elected vets on the council and one elected veterinary nurse. So in 2024, and Paul referenced this earlier, the council submitted a set of amendments to the legislation to the department. As you know that that makeup of the council is set out in legislation so the council itself can't change it. So in those suggested amendments, one of them is to reduce the size of the council and that would reduce the number of vets on the council to six and increase the number of veterinary nurses to two which would be kind of proportionate with the number of registrants. So we would strongly encourage that. But you're supportive of that? Oh yes. Well I think that's obvious. That's really interesting because we wouldn't have been aware of that from reading the documents other than this one sentence that talks about supporting nurses as a key objective. So now you've shared that with us so we've the benefit of knowing that. And I think that's important and from our point of view if there's a requirement to expedite the statutory regulations or changes we certainly can give voice to that if that's what the committee decide to the minister. So I want to thank you for that. In terms of your both presentations, I'm going back to both groups now. So you've set out your issues, you've set out your concerns, but I'm nonetheless about what your key asks are. I mean I read it three times and I said what can I take away from this that tells me what is the three key asks from the Veterinary Council or for that matter your own organisation, Veterinary Ireland. And maybe in these last few minutes you might just set out, shall we say somebody else, Owen, you might set out in one minute what are your three top key asks that you'd like this committee to take on board and sort of advocate for. I think having talked about the different types of practices in the country it's important to know any, as Alan said as well, any nurse in any practice is considered integral to the team in the practice. They're very valuable. I think from Veterinary Ireland's point of view we would always promote any of our members to make sure they utilise the nurse's full capabilities in practice. I know the nurses, the last day they were here they spoke about their concerns regarding the utilisation of nurses in practice and we go back to the note guide from the Veterinary Council. Sorry to cut you there Owen, but just say the key asks, we know the situation, what are your key asks of this committee in furtherance as you would see it to support the recruitment and retention of veterinary nurses. What are the key asks you'd like to make of us, this committee? I think a huge thing as I said already are the costs associated with running a practice now. We've seen in human medicine that there are significant subsidies for general practices and similar to veterinary general practices to the provision of 24-hour service and absolutely we'd love to be able to pay both veterinary assistants, as we mentioned, and veterinary nurses. We'd love to be able to pay them a lot more but unfortunately we're governed by the income we can take in from fees and we don't see how we can... So anything else you would like to ask this committee to advocate for? No, you've no more to add to that. Could I suggest then and maybe ask Niamh in terms of veterinary nurses, what asks you would like in terms of the Veterinary Council that you'd like to ask this committee to further advocate for you in terms of the recruitment and retention of veterinary nurses? Thank you, that's a great question. So we already have submitted our list of legislative amendments, lots of which relate to nurses as we already discussed the number of nurses on the committee but also we would like to set up a nurse specialist register. We would like to be able to publish the list of nurses that are on our register and as well as a variety of other asks that are within the legislative amendments. They've been sitting with the Department of Agriculture now since 2024 so we would love to get some momentum on that. From our end we will continue to promote the role of the veterinary nurse. As part of that then in our workforce review one of the recommendations was that we would go to the Department of Agriculture to look for financial support particularly in rural and more vulnerable areas. So this is not just to protect animal welfare but also importantly to protect food safety and biosecurity. Vets play a vital role in the whole One Health initiative. We have lots of international examples of other jurisdictions where we'll say government supports have been provided to try to assist with veterinary services being available in rural locations. Thank you very much, thank you very much for your engagement with us. I think it's really positive. I'm really welcoming the idea that the reduction of the veterinary council but I'm welcoming that we'll now have two veterinary nurses. I think that's important and if any additional documentation in relation to the details that you've described and the documents before the minister I think they may be helpful for our committee because certainly we can then hopefully if that's agreed by the committee give that a bit more impetus and raise that with the Minister of Agriculture. Thank you very much.