Join John Scholefield and Anne Seaton for an introduction to SRUC veterinary services and the role they play as part of SRUC. From supporting farmers and veterinary practices to tackling infectious disease, the work is varied and never dull.

The team covers disease surveillance for the Scottish Government, so this involves doing post-mortem examinations and laboratory testing to diagnose disease and to investigate disease outbreaks. This work goes across the range of livestock species, so cattle, sheep, pigs, poultry and game birds as well as other species are monitored by the team.

They also do testing for a wide variety of conditions and medical issues animals may experience. They also offer training courses, health schemes, quality assurance schemes and a whole lot else besides. Listen to the episode to learn about the breadth and depth of work they do.

To learn more, visit www.sruc.ac.uk/vets

Hello, I'm John Schofield. And today I'm going to be talking to Anne Seaton, veterinary manager, about SRUC veterinary services and the role it plays as part of SRUC.

So and in a nutshell, what role does SRUC veterinary services play?

Thanks John.

Vet services has variety of rules, but I guess one of our key things is and our key history is around supporting farmers and veterinary practises to tackling infectious disease and that sort of history that's been going on for decades.

So we use.

Post-mortem examinations and laboratory testing to diagnose disease and to investigate disease problems based in part on that.

Work we provide.

Disease surveillance for the Scottish Government and that's across the range of livestock species, so cattle, sheep, pigs and various miscellaneous species, poultry game birds as well.

But a key part of that surveillance, as well as just the testing, is relationships that we have with vets.

Practise and with our farming clients. And so there's a key bit around investigating problems and investigating.

And when things have gone wrong, but also another big part of what we do is running the health schemes, so helping farmers produce healthy, sustainable livestock, we've got a wide range of customers, so practises and farmers and that's within Scotland and the rest of.

GB in Northern Ireland, but we also work directly with breed societies with other laboratories with pharmaceutical companies.

Biotech companies as well, so a range of customers on the livestock.

Need we also serve as companion animal and practises run a quality assurance scheme for companion animal practises and provide leading CPD to their new practitioners. So it's a wide range of services that we provide and that's.

And liberty.

That's great. Yeah. Brilliant. Thank you.

And in terms of how you operate then you know where SAIC vet services are based. You know how many staff do you have can you tell us a bit more about that?

Yes, sure. So we're basically we're based across Scotland and that's in terms of our disease surveillance and relationship with our practises.

That's one of the one of our key elements. So we've got post-mortem sites in Aberdeen, St Boswells and.

Dumfries. There's also a post mortem site that's run in conjunction with Glasgow School of any Medicine. And there's that. And that is in just at the campus.

There's a post mortem room in Thurso and that's supported by the local practise, and we carry out some postmortems not on livestock species, but companion animals, wild animals, wild birds at Pentland Science Park, just outside Edinburgh. And there's three surveillance hubs.

The VFIO's maintaining the contacts for the practises and the farmers in Perth, Inverness and air.

The main testing facility we have, the Bitmain Analytical Laboratories, it's Co located with the modern Research Institute, which is very useful collaboration there at the Perelman Science Park.

Overall, we've got.

There's around 120 staff with about 23 vets, 50 scientists who also would be officer people involved in the animal health planning, data managers, et cetera.

And they and the team that teams supporting the submission and registration of the health scheme samples and also the clinical pathology samples, so quite wide range, quite geographical distribution and a variety of different expertise and.

Professions involved.

Thank you. And in terms of the testing itself, what is offered by SRUC veterinary services?

Again, quite a range. So not only do we carry out testing on veterinary samples from livestock and companion animals, but we also carry out testing on soils feeds organic wastes in the chemistry section. So in the veterinary and analytical laboratory.

We've got experienced teams working in molecular biology, serology, chemistry, Bio-Chem.

Chemistry, microbiology, parasitology and histopathology. They're primarily involved in analysing veterinary samples. The chemistry team dealing more with the the the non veterinary samples. In addition, there's the, the, the, the VSA team, which are essentially the sample reception and processing.

MATBA.

There's a team at Saint Boswells who are registering the health scheme samples and team in Penang Science Park that's involved in the Clean path and soils, etcetera. Coming in there. Yeah. And I think it's just worth mentioning that the the majority of the.

The work that's carried out is UCAS, credited given that sort of level of rigour and quality assurance that we need and for our test.

Great. Thank you. And can you tell us about the livestock disease surveillance side of what you do?

Yeah, sure. So that's all. It's always been key function of VET services over time to provide that and disease surveillance and the reason that that, that.

The government need it is a in order to.

Give assurances about disease freedom to permit international trade, and it's a lot of. It's also about awareness of new or emerging conditions as well as assessment of potential risks both in the livestock population and in relation to human.

So SRUC provides expert advice on the surveillance infrastructure in place, and it's increasingly important because with climate change, and in particular, it's already altering patterns.

Of disease that.

That we've seen. So we need to take very proactive way to proactive approach to assessing the surveillance that we've got in place.

To make sure that we can.

Protect the livestock health in the country so there's disease invested. As I said already, disease investigations carried out on carcasses and that's really underpinned disease surveillance work for a long time and there's very strong networks amongst the.

Scientists and the vets within SoC vet services.

And colleagues in a PHA and elsewhere in GB and elsewhere in Europe that provides a very comprehensive early warning system of an intelligence based system of disease. But changing disease patterns or potential risks.

The other thing that we're increasingly doing is looking at data to provide us with.

Because there are blind spots in that sort of traditional post-mortem and sample based approach, we're increasingly looking at data and syndromic developments and the surveillance, surveillance and intelligence unit that's being developed with colleagues in.

At the Centre for Epidemiology and Planetary Health, Safe in Inverness.

We're looking to create a A resilient infrastructure that builds not only on the power of the networks and infrastructure we have in place, but goes beyond that to areas that that traditional type of disease surveillance is less good at, where it's less good at picking up signals.

So it never stands still and it's a A at this point. Particularly emphasis on getting into.

And utilising that data, that will give us early warnings or potential signals about incidents that are occurring. So we can then investigate them.

Thank you. So when it comes to things like innovation, research and development, how important is that to the role of SRUC veterinary services?

It's. Yeah, it's good question. It's critical cause. Yeah, we can't. We can't stand still diagnostic.

Techniques and disease patterns are always changing and we're always looking for new ways to tackling this infectious disease and livestock. And there's history of developing tests and processes as well to enable us to handle samples.

Efficiently and to able to enable us to diagnose.

To get better diagnostics of infectious disease and deal with condition new conditions that have as they get identified and there's often collaboration with the modern Research Institute in that they are often involved in the initial development of disease diagnostics.

Before they move over to us.

To run on a larger scale and in terms of scale, one of the key things that are to the key things that have happened over time is the introduction of robotics and in handling samples cause that's meant that we can handle the the throughput in the most efficient way and developing.

Old testing. Both of those things have meant that the competitiveness of what we're what we're doing can be maintained and we can actually handle the throughputs, the that we are presented with cause it's up to 3/4 of a million samples goes through the vet services.

Labs per annum. So yeah, we need to develop ways of handling that.

Don't rely on individual pipetting of samples, which just not be practical in those circumstances. Just recent examples of the changes that are ongoing is Gareth and his team in chemistry have set up a new.

Analyzer which gives us a bit of resilience and also gives us a little bit more speed in terms of the testing of soils and the serology team have taken on taking in-house sheep's catalyser, so we're always.

Looking to develop things, but yeah, fundamentally vet services about is about a lot more than just providing the test results and the interpretations.

So we've also been involved for quite a while in various ways with.

Researchers, some within SRUC, some out with SRUC. It's something we're looking to build, but we already we have a good, strong place to build from because there are very good Connexions between members of our team and others with an SRUC.

There's also increasingly collaboration and working, either just as a commercial arrangement where we're carrying out tests for others. But yeah, working with.

Other research organisations, so by tangents for example, were also based in the Pentland Science Park. We've been assisting them both, the molecular team and the microbiology team have been assisting them in developing of their diagnostic techniques based more on the our ability to carry out post mortems and the coverage of the country we've also.

Worked with Sasa to support their project to provide them with the post mortem work when they were investigating land predation.

And.

Potentially involvement of various species in lamb predation. Another thing that is really great value that we see within SRU.

Seeing beyond is our contact with practises and farmers, which can mean that researchers can get a lot more impact impacts from what they're doing by because we can use these leverage these contacts.

There are a lot of both practitioners and farmers who are more than happy to get involved in various projects and investigations.

You know, particularly when it's something that is of interest to them and we very often have these contacts that.

That we can use.

And beyond that, we've got large quantities of stored data around the testing and around the health schemes that historical data.

We've also got things like the pathogen bank where we have bacteria stored on beads that can be used and is being used.

And death.

Has taken that forward to ensure that we've got a, a strong resource there that can be accessed for people investigating different bacteria.

So yeah, I a lot of Connexions and a lot of assets that we have that would be value to within SRUC and elsewhere.

So obviously you've talked about in input from the industry there, but when it comes back to sharing knowledge and expertise to help to help the industry, how does vet services achieve that?

Yeah. And it's, I think that's the again one is, it's also one of the key parts. It's is that the the link back out as well.

So there's a there's the ongoing day-to-day interactions that BI's. Have we have a system of duty vets. So we've got our vets available.

On the phone to discuss.

Either sample results or I guess more crisply investigations and support practitioners with their investigations, and so the knowledge that they have, they are using that on a day-to-day basis to inform the conversations with our practitioners.

We also focus on getting that the messages back out from the silence messages from.

The work we've done getting those back out to practitioners through whether that's through the newsletters, one of the things we've done traditionally, it's been with meetings and practise visits. The other thing it's obviously become far more.

Common particularly sort of pushed on by the pandemic, was using webinars and we run a series of it's just at least one a month of webinars and pass that information back out to the.

To the practises, usually based around specific disease issues can be also about disease trends or changes in diagnostics or discussion around control strategies.

So there's also part of the cycle that's involved with the with the surveillance is also in these conversations that we're that the the guys are having with the practitioners is intelligence gathering that all feeds into.

And an understanding of the pattern of diseases that are as they recurring and whether things are changing on this or more formal structured side vet services also runs a series of vet new CPD courses. So we've got.

Courses on infectious diseases that so we can use the the the expertise that we have and the particular expertise that RBI's have within diagnostics to present that to practitioners in these courses that on infectious.

Diseases and sheep.

Cattle. We also called the health planning managing respiratory disease, parasite control and sheep and cattle are the current ones that we that that we have.

And it's not all about practitioners, because we also are involved in teaching and so teaching and apprenticeships.

An education in a in a variety of ways.

So we've were involved in teaching SRUC students both Fe and undergrads around with about livestock disease and the scientific staff are also involved in apprenticeships, so we, with them apprentices coming from local high schools.

And get the opportunity to work alongside the experts in our labs to be exposed to that work and learn.

So it's a broad range that that we do provide and there is probably more that we can be provided in that area as well.

I think I guess.

One of the other key links that we have there is with consulting colleagues and the farmer's advisory service.

So our team are very often involved in presenting material to farmers, whether that be through fast TV or events on farms, et cetera. So yeah, the, the, the bottom line is that.

The the greatest asset assets that we that we have across VET services is our people cause the the enthusiasm they have for what they do.

And the drive to make a difference to livestock farmers in the wider rural economy in Scotland and beyond that is one of our major assets. We really do have a very good team of scientists, vets and sports staff across VET services.

Right. Thank you very much. That's. Yeah, that's a fantastic overview of the whole of veterinary services. So yeah, I'd just like to say thanks very much for your time and for.

Explaining all of that.

Thank you.