Sustainability in the veterinary industry

March 6, 2026

Níamh Ní Bhroin MVB MRCVS CertAVP(SAM) PgCertVPS, a small animal vet and the chairperson of the Veterinary Sustainability Network Ireland, discusses what sustainability means in relation to the veterinary industry in Ireland.

Bluetongue in the UK: what Ireland needs to know before the virus takes hold

August 10, 2026

A UK farm vet’s frontline account of a bluetongue season gone from mild to devastating – and what it means for vaccination strategy in Ireland this autumn.

From the Vet Space Ireland podcast with Michelle Maguire and Richard Ryan (ArchersField Vets, Kilkenny), in conversation with Jonathan Hobbs, farm vet partner at North Park Veterinary Group, Devon, and Junior Vice President of the Sheep Veterinary Society.

A season that changed everything

When bluetongue virus (BTV) first reached the southeast of England in the autumn of 2023, it looked like a containable, one-off incursion. Midge plumes had blown the virus across the Channel from the Netherlands into Norfolk, Suffolk and Kent, and government surveillance picked up a handful of positive animals. Affected herds were culled, exclusion zones were set up, and the virus did not survive the winter. It seemed, for a moment, like a lucky escape.

It was not. Speaking on the Vet Space Ireland podcast, Jonathan Hobbs, a farm vet partner at North Park Veterinary Group in Devon and Junior Vice President of the Sheep Veterinary Society, walked through how that single incursion has grown into what he now describes as the UK farming equivalent of foot and mouth disease for his generation of vets.

In 2024 the virus arrived earlier in the season, giving it enough time to establish in the native midge population before winter. It spread from the southeast towards the Midlands and along the south coast, and crucially, it overwintered. By 2025, helped by a prolonged heatwave and drought that accelerated both midge activity and viral replication in the insects, bluetongue exploded across sheep and cattle farms in the southwest of England.

“Last year was our warning shot. This year is the Dutch experience we were scared of two years ago, where twenty per cent of the national flock was killed.”
– Jonathan Hobbs

What it looks like on farm

The species picture is stark. Sheep are by far the worst affected, followed by cattle, while goats are almost always asymptomatic and camelids remain at some risk. On the practice’s worst-hit farms this season, up to seventy-five per cent of clinically affected sheep have died, which works out at roughly twenty per cent total flock mortality once morbidity and mortality are combined.

Clinical signs in sheep include painful erosions on the dental pad, cuts and crusting around the mouth and nose, swollen heads, and lameness from coronary band involvement, signs that in previous years might have been mistaken for insect stings or adder bites. Cattle tend to show milder signs, including a reddened or crusty nose, swollen teats, reduced milk yield, and some lameness. Hobbs noted that cattle cases are often overshadowed by the sheer volume of sheep cases coming through the door, even though they are almost certainly under reported.

Sheep: dental pad erosions, mouth ulceration, crusty or swollen nose, swollen heads, coronary band lameness
Cattle: nose reddening or crusting, swollen teats, milk drop, lameness, generally milder disease
Goats: almost always asymptomatic
Camelids: at risk of clinical disease

There is no animal to animal spread. Bluetongue moves exclusively via infected midges, which is a key point of reassurance when ruling out other notifiable diseases, though Hobbs stressed that every suspect case still needs to be tested, both to confirm the strain and to rule out foot and mouth disease on farms where clinical signs could overlap.

Vaccination works, and the economics are stark

Hobbs was unambiguous: the vaccine is highly effective, and the practice’s own numbers back it up. North Park achieved roughly fifteen per cent vaccine uptake among eligible stock last year, against a national average of just five per cent, and farms that vaccinated ahead of last spring avoided the barren rates and dummy calf presentations that hit unvaccinated herds hard at scanning and calving.

Out of around sixty confirmed cases at the practice this season, only one has occurred in a previously vaccinated animal, a dairy cow with a complicating BVD persistently infected animal issue on farm that likely affected her vaccine response. Hobbs was also clear that farmers should not hold back on vaccinating bulls and rams despite cautious vaccine data sheet wording. The testes are an immune privileged site, meaning bluetongue virus can persist and shed in semen for months even after an animal has cleared the virus from its bloodstream, with normal semen morphology and motility masking underlying fertility damage. A short, mild vaccine reaction is a far smaller risk than a week or more of fever and illness, or worse, from natural infection.

“A dead bull is going to give you exactly zero calves. A vaccinated bull who might be off for a day is still going to give you plenty.”
– Jonathan Hobbs

The financial case is equally direct. Using an average lamb value of around one hundred and forty pounds a head, a thousand head flock facing twenty per cent mortality could lose in the region of twenty eight thousand pounds. Vaccinating that same flock costs roughly two and a half thousand pounds. As Hobbs put it, that is cheap insurance against a loss that is now playing out on farms across the south west.

Vaccine supply has struggled to keep pace with the sudden surge in demand this season, with wholesalers issuing stock in unpredictable drops rather than the reliable next day delivery practices are used to. Hobbs’s advice to farmers who have not yet vaccinated is to order early rather than wait, given that the peak bluetongue season typically runs from September through November as viral load builds through the autumn.

Reading the case numbers with caution

One of the most important points Hobbs raised concerns how bluetongue statistics are reported in the UK. Government figures record a “case” as an affected holding, not an affected animal, and testing authorities sample only three animals per holding. A single reported case can therefore represent dozens of dead or affected animals on one farm, while a headline figure of a few hundred cases nationally can understate the true scale of an outbreak considerably.

This matters for how the disease is perceived from a distance. Vets and farmers in areas not yet affected, or in countries like Ireland looking at the UK situation from across the Irish Sea, can easily read modest national case counts and conclude the risk is overstated. Hobbs’s message was the opposite: by the time the numbers look alarming, the disease is already established and difficult to control.

What this means for Ireland

Ireland recorded a small number of bluetongue cases in the latter part of last year, and Hobbs believes that was likely sufficient for the virus to have overwintered here. His reading of the UK’s own trajectory, a quiet first year followed by a far more severe second season once the virus reaches a critical mass in the local midge population, is a direct warning for Irish practices and farmers this autumn and into next spring.

Bluetongue was also compared during the conversation to Schmallenberg virus, which is carried by the same Culicoides midge and is already well established in parts of the southeast of Ireland. Hobbs described bluetongue as essentially “Schmallenberg on steroids”, a useful shorthand for vets explaining the risk to clients who may already be familiar with Schmallenberg’s fertility impacts but have not yet seen a bluetongue case.

His central message for Irish vets and farmers is not to be lulled by a mild season. A low case count this year does not mean the risk has passed, it may simply mean the outbreak has not yet reached the threshold it needs to explode the following spring. Supporting general herd and flock health, including worm control, mineral status and nutrition, also appeared to reduce case severity and improve response to treatment on affected UK farms, alongside vaccination as the primary defence.

Sheep Veterinary Society conference, Kilkenny

Hobbs also used the conversation to flag the Sheep Veterinary Society’s autumn conference, taking place in Kilkenny from Monday the 28th to Wednesday the 30th of September. The Society is a specialist division of the British Veterinary Association, open to international members including vets in Ireland, with annual membership priced at around seventy pounds.

The three-day conference costs under five hundred pounds and includes international speakers on bluetongue alongside Irish parasite specialists, with at least half a day dedicated to vets presenting clinical cases from their own practices. Hobbs, who takes over as Society president at the event, described it as a genuinely clinically focused meeting, with much of the value coming from informal conversation between sessions. For more information go to – sheepvetsoc.org.uk

This article is based on a conversation recorded for the Vet Space Ireland podcast. Listen to the full episode at vetspaceireland.ie.

Article written by Vet Space Ireland

To contribute to the Vet Space Journal, appear on the podcast, or get involved with VSI, contact us at inspire@vetspaceireland.ie or visit vetspaceireland.ie

Vet Space Ireland is a non-profit, volunteer-powered veterinary community platform. Founded 2019.

The deal you’ll only ever do once: selling your veterinary practice

August 4, 2026

A Roberts Advisory series for veterinary practice owners

By Roberts Advisory | 4th August 2026

If you own a veterinary practice, you have spent years, or possibly decades, building something with your name on it. You have carried the late calls, the staffing headaches, the quiet worry about cash flow in a slow month, and the pride of a waiting room full of clients who trust you. And then one day, whether by plan or by a phone call you did not expect, the question arrives: would you ever think about selling?

For almost every owner, selling the practice is a thing they will do exactly once. That single fact sits at the heart of everything we want to share in this series, because it changes the odds in a way most owners only realise afterwards.

A game you’re playing for the first time

Think about what happens when an approach comes in. On one side of the table is you: an excellent clinician and a capable business owner, but someone selling a practice for the first and only time in your life. On the other side is a buyer who may complete a deal like yours every few weeks. They have a team of finance and legal people. They have seen every kind of practice, every set of accounts, every negotiating position. They do this for a living.

It is a little like sitting down to a game of chess having played a few friendly matches, opposite someone who plays at a professional level. You might be sharp, and you might do well. But the person across from you knows the openings, the middle game and the endgame in a way you simply cannot after one sitting. That is not a criticism of you. It is just the reality of experience against inexperience, and it is the single biggest imbalance in any business sale.

Your accountant and solicitor are excellent – and this is a different job

When we make this point, owners often say, reasonably, that they already have a trusted accountant and a good solicitor. So they do, and those relationships matter enormously.

But it is worth being clear about what those advisers do brilliantly, and what sits outside their day-to-day. Your accountant prepares your accounts and manages your tax. Your solicitor handles your conveyancing and your legal affairs. They are very good at those things. Negotiating and controlling the sale of a business against a professional buyer, though, is a different discipline again, and for most general practices it is not something their working week is built around. A sale is a specialist, one-off event, and it rewards those people who do it repeatedly.

There is also a quieter point about objectivity. An adviser who has known you for twenty years, who is a friend as much as a professional, can find it genuinely hard to deliver an uncomfortable message at a tense moment. Sometimes the most valuable thing in a deal is someone whose only job is to look after your side of the table, and who has no hesitation about telling you the hard thing when it needs to be said.

What it means to have someone in your corner

So what does a dedicated adviser actually change? Three things stand out, and none of them is about magic.

The first is simple experience. Someone who has been through many of these processes knows what tends to happen next, where the pressure points are, and what “normal” looks like, so that you are not reading every move as a crisis or a windfall.

The second is that a sale is a project, and it lands on top of a working life you still have to lead. While you are negotiating, you are also running a clinic, seeing patients and managing a team. Requests for information and documents can arrive from every direction and at every hour. Having one person hold all of that, and act as the single point of contact, keeps the process calm and keeps you doing the job you actually trained for.

The third is pace. Time is the quiet enemy of any deal. When a process drifts, energy fades, confidence erodes and good deals can fall apart for no reason other than fatigue. Someone whose job is to keep things moving, steadily and to a plan, protects the outcome as much as any clever negotiating point.

You don’t have to be selling to start thinking

Here is the part we most want owners to hear. None of this is a reason to rush towards the door. Most of the owners we talk to are not selling this year, and many are not selling for several years yet. But the owners who do best are almost always the ones who started thinking early, calmly and on their own terms, rather than the ones who were caught on the back foot by an unexpected approach.

Over the coming articles in this series, we will walk through what that looks like in practice: how to think about timing, how to get your numbers in order, how to make the business less dependent on you, and what a genuinely good outcome involves beyond the headline figure. All of it high level, none of it a hard sell.

Because the goal is not to talk you into anything. It is to make sure that if the day ever comes, you sit down to that one game of your life with someone in your corner who has played it many times before.

Roberts Advisory is Vet Space Ireland’s Horizons Partner and works with veterinary practice owners across Ireland on exit planning, business readiness and the sale of their clinic. We are always happy to talk to owners at any stage, whether a sale is years away or already on the table. Reach out to us at hello@robertsadvisory.ie.

Article written by Roberts Advisory for Vet Space Ireland

To contribute to the Vet Space Journal, appear on the podcast, or get involved with VSI, contact us at inspire@vetspaceireland.ie or visit vetspaceireland.ie

Vet Space Ireland is a non-profit, volunteer-powered veterinary community platform. Founded 2019.

VCI approves new accreditation standards as nurse retention crisis continues

July 30, 2026

New accreditation standards for veterinary education take effect in Ireland this week, against a backdrop of continued Oireachtas scrutiny of veterinary nurse recruitment and retention. Across the Irish Sea, a sharp rise in bluetongue cases is a reminder for vets here to keep pushing vaccination advice, while a fresh BVA intervention on RCVS governance reform echoes debates the VCI itself has faced over its own council structure.

By Vet Space Ireland | 30th July 2026

VCI’s new accreditation standards come into force

The Veterinary Council of Ireland’s newly approved accreditation standards for veterinary medicine and veterinary nursing programmes come into operation on 31 July, applying to all existing and future programmes seeking VCI accreditation. Made under the Council’s statutory remit set out in the Veterinary Practice Act 2005, the standards set contemporary benchmarks across curriculum design, clinical training, facilities, staffing and governance, underpinned by defined “Day One Competencies” for graduates.

VCI president Joe Walsh said the standards reflect both the evolving nature of veterinary practice and the Council’s commitment to ensuring graduates meet the highest standards of animal welfare and public protection. The framework was developed following consultation with higher education institutions and stakeholders across the profession, and is aligned with European and international accreditation frameworks to support the continued recognition and mobility of Irish veterinary graduates.

Oireachtas committee continues to probe veterinary nurse retention

The Joint Committee on Agriculture and Food has continued its engagement on veterinary nurse recruitment and retention, hearing evidence that nearly three-quarters of registered veterinary nurses are considering leaving the profession, unsure about remaining, or planning to leave altogether. The Irish Veterinary Nurses Association has pointed to low pay, burnout and limited career progression as the main drivers, noting an average salary of roughly €36,800 and citing unpaid placement hours as a particular concern.

The VCI has since appeared before the committee, telling members that regulation alone cannot resolve every workforce challenge, while Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine Martin Heydon has said pay and conditions in privately operated practices are a matter for employers and employees rather than government. The exchanges suggest the issue is likely to remain live well into the autumn.

Bluetongue cases climb sharply in England

Defra figures show 54 confirmed bluetongue (BTV-3) cases in England and Wales since the start of the current season on 1 July, with the National Sheep Association reporting 29 positive cases in the last fortnight alone, 15 of them in sheep. The South West, particularly the Exmoor area, has emerged as a hotspot, with officials linking the rise to lower uptake of vaccination this season. Five further cases, in sheep in Devon, were confirmed as recently as 28 July.

Bluetongue is not a UK-only concern. BTV-3 was first confirmed in Ireland in a Co. Wexford suckler herd in January 2026, and DAFM surveillance has since identified cases in at least eight counties, including Wicklow, Laois, Louth, Monaghan, Kildare, Cork and Tipperary. The department has described bluetongue as a disease Ireland will have to learn to live with, following an EU recategorisation that treats it as endemic and under surveillance rather than something to be eradicated. Against that backdrop, the scale of the current English outbreak is a further reminder of the value of continued vigilance and vaccination advice for farmer clients here.

BVA sets out its stall on RCVS governance reform

The British Veterinary Association has published its response to the RCVS’s consultation on governance reform, which closed on 23 July. BVA is calling for reform to be delivered as a single, holistic package rather than piecemeal changes, and wants RCVS Council members, both veterinary and lay, to be appointed through an open, competitive process rather than elected, mirroring governance models used across human healthcare regulation.

The intervention keeps up pressure on a reform process that has been building since Defra’s white paper on replacing the Veterinary Surgeons Act 1966, published earlier this month. For Irish readers, the debate over how a regulator balances elected representation, lay input and independent oversight has clear echoes for the VCI’s own governance, even though its statutory footing and functions differ from those of the RCVS.

References

Veterinary Council of Ireland (30 March 2026), ‘Veterinary Council of Ireland Approves New Accreditation Standards for Veterinary Medicine and Veterinary Nursing Education’: https://cms.vci.ie/veterinary-council-of-ireland-approves-new-accreditation-standards-for-veterinary-medicine-and-veterinary-nursing-education/

Agriland (18 June 2026), ‘Veterinary nurses: “We are facing a retention crisis” : https://www.agriland.ie/farming-news/veterinary-nurses-we-are-facing-a-retention-crisis/

Agriland, ‘Regulation alone cannot resolve every workforce challenge’ – VCI: https://www.agriland.ie/farming-news/regulation-alone-cannot-resolve-every-workforce-challenge-vci/

Houses of the Oireachtas, Committee on Agriculture and Food video archive (15 July 2026 session): https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/oireachtas-tv/video-archive/committees/11989/

Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine, ‘Bluetongue Virus’ (case history for Ireland, first confirmed 24 January 2026, Co. Wexford) https://www.gov.ie/en/department-of-agriculture-food-and-the-marine/publications/bluetongue-virus/

Agriland, ‘Bluetongue “a disease we’re going to have to learn to live with” – DAFM’: https://www.agriland.ie/farming-news/bluetongue-a-disease-were-going-to-have-to-learn-to-live-with-dafm/

GOV.UK, ‘Bluetongue: latest situation’ (Defra/APHA case figures for England and Wales): https://www.gov.uk/guidance/bluetongue

National Sheep Association, ‘2026 bluetongue updates’ (24 July 2026 entry https://nationalsheep.org.uk/2026-bluetongue-updates/

British Veterinary Association, ‘BVA calls for holistic approach to RCVS governance reform in its response to the College’s consultation’: https://www.bva.co.uk/news-and-blog/news-article/bva-calls-for-holistic-approach-to-rcvs-governance-reform-in-its-response-to-the-college-s-consultation/

Article written by Vet Space Ireland

To contribute to the Vet Space Journal, appear on the podcast, or get involved with VSI, contact us at inspire@vetspaceireland.ie or visit vetspaceireland.ie

Vet Space Ireland is a non-profit, volunteer-powered veterinary community platform. Founded 2019.

Sustainability can be defined as meeting “the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs”(Swanson et al., 2013). It is a topic that is being increasingly discussed and promoted in the media and corporate world. To explain further what sustainability covers, the Three Ps are commonly used – People, Planet and Profit.

Under the People heading, personal wellbeing, health, equality and diversity are included. Planet includes the changing climate, biodiversity, pollution and waste. Profit involves protecting our livelihoods, our communities and our heritage.

One area that is very topical is, of course, climate change, resulting from an increase in greenhouse gas emissions due to human population expansion over the past 100 years. Greenhouse gases include carbon dioxide (e.g., fossil fuels, cement production), F-gases (e.g., anaesthestic gases, refrigerants), nitrous oxide (e.g., fossil fuels, agriculture) and methane (e.g., agricultural emissions, food waste). The collective effect of these gases is usually expressed in carbon equivalents. These gases trap heat in the atmosphere, resulting in an overall increase in global temperatures and ocean acidification.

The Climate Action Plan (Department of the Environment, 2023) outlines how there have been observable increases in both the sea levels in Ireland and temperatures in Ireland since the 1990s. 15 of the top 20 warmest years in Ireland have occurred since 1990. These changes are projected to continue an upward trend, bringing with them extremes in rainfall and flooding, increases in sea levels, increased storm events and increased risk of drought in certain areas.

Is there any reason to hope?

It is a difficult area in which to create change, given it requires a multi-disciplinary approach, and the effects of changes made are not evident immediately. However, since climate change has been recognised as a rapidly emerging issue, progress has been made in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. For example, 40% of the Republic of Ireland’s energy came from renewable sources in 2023 (EirGrid, 2024) with continually developing plans to improve this. The number of electric vehicles in Ireland as a proportion of newly registered vehicles has increased from 0.5% in 2015 to 27.6% in 2023 (McLoughlin, 2024).

It may feel like it is too large a problem for an individual’s actions to make a difference. However, individual actions are cumulative and the diagram below from Lee et al. (2021) demonstrates how new ideas or processes are taken up in society over time. During the initial period, it may feel like there are very few people who believe in your idea, but over time, the people partaking in this action will increase exponentially until a majority is reached. In other words, change happens from individual actions eventually influencing the majority.

How does the veterinary profession come into this?

Veterinarians have a lot of potential to influence change in this area, given that we are at the centre of One Health, advocating for animal, planetary and human health. This includes improving and maintaining the human-animal bond for pet owners, advising farmers on sustainable agriculture, monitoring for disease outbreaks and advocating for good antimicrobial stewardship. We are also seen as a trusted profession by the public. The World Veterinary Organization issued a statement in 2020 (WVA, 2020) where they state that veterinarians “have a responsibility to protect ecosystem health and demand action to minimize climate change” (World Veterinary Organisation, 2020). Based on the above, it is feasible to say that veterinary practices and professionals are in an excellent position to create a meaningful change in this area.

We don’t have a figure for the impact of the Irish veterinary sector on emissions, but it is estimated that the healthcare industry is a significant producer of greenhouse gases, producing approximately 4.6% of global emissions (Health Care Without Harm, 2024). From this data, it is reasonable to suggest that the veterinary industry would also be a significant contributor to GHG emissions. Therefore, tackling our emissions as an industry would help reduce emissions overall. Ireland’s greenhouse gas emissions per capita in 2020 was one of the highest in Europe (Central Statistics Office, 2022) and the Climate Action Plan (Department of the Environment, 2023) sets a target to reduce the emissions of Irish businesses by 35% by 2030. This directly involves veterinary businesses as stakeholders.

What can we do?

Focusing on individual impact

We each need to take responsibility for our impact on the earth and each other. The average carbon footprint of an individual in Ireland was 10.4tCO₂eq in 2023. This is a 10% reduction from our levels in 2005, with a target of reducing our overall emissions to 42% below the 2005 levels by 2030 (McLoughlin, 2024).

To start on your own emission reduction journey, the following steps are a good place to start:

Determine your own carbon footprint (Giki Zero at https://zero.giki.earth/ and WWF at https://footprint.wwf.org.uk/) provide carbon footprint calculators which are free to use ),
Determine the areas where your carbon footprint is largest (e.g., travel, energy consumption, dietary),
Set achievable and measurable goals in each of these areas to reduce these figures (e.g., travel to work once weekly using public transport instead of your own vehicle).

The 5 Rs of sustainability can be used when developing these goals. They are, in hierarchal order:

Refuse e.g., refusing single-use containers,
Reduce e.g., reducing household energy consumption by switching to LED lightbulbs,
Reuse e.g., invest in a reusable water bottle instead of buying single-use bottled water,
Repurpose e.g., using bubble wrap for patient heat retention intra-operatively,
Recycle e.g., milk carton recycling.

Focusing on practice impact

There are many areas that can be improved upon in our veterinary practices, including the carbon footprint of the practice, the resources used by the business, how the practice is prescribing and disposing of medications, and how the practice is affecting biodiversity. Again, a good place to start improving your carbon footprint would be to determine your current footprint, perform an audit of your company (by nominating a green champion or using an external service) and creating an action plan on how to reduce your negative impact on these areas.

Examples of these might include:

Carbon footprint reduction –
- Improving the building insulation,
- Switching to a more efficient heating system (e.g., from oil-based to a heat pump system),
- Switch to a renewable energy provider,
- Install solar panels on the business premises.
Resource use –
- Install low-flow tap systems,
- Print on both sides of paper,
- Incorporate low-flow anaesthesia into your practice (by using a combination of a tailored analgesia plans and capnography for small animal surgeries),
- Using alcohol-based sterilising material.
Responsible medicine usage:
- Prescribe the correct medication for the correct diagnosis,
- Use the correct dose,
- Only prescribe and dispense for the duration required,
- Inform owners on how to dispose of the medication correctly,
- Inform owners on how to apply the medication correctly and any precautions to take doing so (e.g., no swimming after the application of topical parasiticides),
- Adhere to antimicrobial prescribing guidelines such as PROTECT ME (BSAVA/SAMSoc, 2024).
Biodiversity:
- Plant a biodiversity corner or plant box in your practice. See the All-Ireland Pollinator Plan (https://pollinators.ie/) for inspiration. Some pollinator-friendly plants include crocus, crab apple trees, Irish ivy and ox-eye daisy.
- Go pesticide-free in your practice garden,
- Plant a pocket forest if the space is available (see https://www.pocketforests.ie/),
- Hang bird feeders and put up a bird box (see https://birdwatchireland.ie/ for guidance).

Focusing on community impact

A veterinary practice’s climate shadow (the influence one can have outside of the direct changes you make) can have a very significant impact on society, from demonstrating that we care about our world to our clients which may then inspire them to change, to educating and collaborating with our farm animal clients to improve their herd health. Some ways to promote sustainable veterinary in this area are:

Educate clients on safe disposal of medications,
Have a sustainability board in your reception, elaborating on some of your sustainability journey stories so clients can take inspiration from it,
Educate your team on sustainability so they can answer questions from clients on this topic (e.g., having your team becoming carbon literate),
Discuss sustainability with suppliers (e.g., waste-free packaging options from pharmaceutical suppliers),
Promote a herd-health approach on farms to improve welfare and performance.

Key take aways

The veterinary profession in Ireland is in a powerful position to create a greener and more sustainable future for Ireland. We have a wide sphere of influence and are seen as trusted members of society. To begin this journey in your practice, a good place to start would be to initiate a conversation with your colleagues and to engage with our community, Veterinary Sustainability Network Ireland. We hope that through engagement and education, we will begin to see a shift in our industry towards a more sustainable future for all.

References

Central Statistics Office (2022) Sustainable Development Goal 13. Available at: https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-sdg13/irelandsunsdgs-goal13climateaction2021/ (Accessed: 7 January 2025).

Department of the Environment, C. and C. (2023) CLIMATE ACTION PLAN 2023 CAP23. Available at: https://assets.gov.ie/270956/94a5673c-163c-476a-921f-7399cdf3c8f5.pdf (Accessed: 7 January 2025).

EirGrid (2024) Fuel Mix 2023 Pie Chart. Available at: https://cms.eirgrid.ie/sites/default/files/publications/Fuel-Mix-2023-Updated-July-2024.png (Accessed: 18 January 2025).

Health Care Without Harm (2024) Climate Change. Available at: https://europe.noharm.org/climate-change (Accessed: 7 January 2025).

Lee, J. et al. (2021) ‘Crossing the Innovation Chasm: Identifying Facilitators and Barriers to Early Adoption of the Global Health Starter Kit Curriculum’, Annals of Global Health, 87(1). Available at: https://doi.org/10.5334/aogh.3356.

McLoughlin, E. (2024) ENVIRONMENTAL INDICATORS Quarter 2 2024 – 07 June, Houses of the Oireachtas. Available at: https://data.oireachtas.ie/ie/oireachtas/libraryResearch/2024/2024-06-07_l-rs-infographic-environmental-indicators-quarter-2-2024_en.pdf (Accessed: 18 January 2025).

BSAVA/SAMSoc (2024) ‘PROTECT ME’, in BSAVA/SAMSoc Guide to Responsible Use of Antibiotics: PROTECT ME (2024). British Small Animal Veterinary Association. Available at: https://doi.org/10.22233/9781913859312.4_1.

Swanson, K.S. et al. (2013) ‘Nutritional Sustainability of Pet Foods’, Advances in Nutrition, 4(2), pp. 141–150. Available at: https://doi.org/10.3945/an.112.003335.

World Veterinary Organisation (2020) WVA Position on the Global Climate Change Emergency. Available at: https://worldvet.org/uploads/news/docs/wva_position_on_the_global_climate_change_emergency.pdf
(Accessed: 7 January 2025).

This article was originally published in the Irish Veterinary Journal.

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Níamh Ní Bhroin MVB MRCVS CertAVP(SAM) PgCertVPS, a small animal vet and the chairperson of the Veterinary Sustainability Network Ireland. The Veterinary Sustainability Network Ireland is a network of veterinary professionals in Ireland. It aims to engage, educate and collaborate with veterinary professionals on improving sustainability practices in the profession by developing guidelines and resources to aid individuals and businesses in doing so. The VSNI can be found on Instagram @vsnireland and can be contacted by emailing Níamh at vsnireland@gmail.com.