Hello, it's really great to meet you! I'm really honoured to be interviewing you today as someone who's really interested in the veterinary field. Before we begin, would you like to introduce yourself and provide a brief summary of your career and your current position at OVC?

Sure Kate, thanks for inviting me. This is an interesting project that you’re doing and I think it is very relevant and that it is really good for us to reflect back on these last few years and try and learn as much as we can from them. It probably won't be our last pandemic, unfortunately, to deal with in your lifetime. I’m the Dean at the Ontario Veterinary College; I’m a veterinarian by training and I trained in New Zealand. My training was largely in large animal veterinary medicine but I now found myself at this stage of my career to lead one of the top veterinary schools in the world, so I feel very honoured to do so. I’m clearly an administrator who has a pretty large portfolio as you mentioned earlier. I’m not just a traditional one for academic departments but also for a very large teaching and referral hospital, which is often seen as the face of OVC to the rest of the community. We certainly had our fair share of dealing with issues with covid. Not dissimilar to other academic departments and colleges across the campus, but also not dissimilar to frontline healthcare workers that have worked in human healthcare, which I’ll explain as we go forward as well.

Thank you very much. You have a very large range of responsibilities as the Dean so thank you for that introduction. My first question would be, what were your own professional goals, or goals associated with the OVC when the pandemic started in March 2020?

I don’t think we were unusual, we had done some scenario planning over the decades to prepare for emergencies. The campus and probably the public sector, in general, felt like they were maybe reasonably well prepared but I don't think any of us were prepared for this. I don’t think we’ve ever done a scenario quite like this, sort of a slow-burn infectious disease that would still be with us 3-4 years later. I’ll be the first to admit that we have a lot to learn from this experience. I think that we saw the signs, we acted I think preemptively as best we could. Still, especially with regard to continuing labour shortages which we were experiencing pre-COVID and then were exacerbated during COVID, and the length of time the pandemic has plagued us, has really been a struggle for all of us. Those that are at work, trying to maintain their research or teaching programs have had to work just that much harder to keep all of these things afloat. To do so, for so many years, has really taken a toll. As a leader, I felt that very acutely and it is my job to try to facilitate and support my people in a way that helps get us through this and keep our eyes on the larger goals: continual improvement in the work that we do and in service to society. Whether that be training new veterinarians, new scientists, or grad students of the future; providing care for animals; or taking care of our food supply which is become a big issue. We’re also dealing with the avian influenza outbreak right now and many of our people on our team are involved in this to make sure that eggs and poultry products stay on the shelves at supermarkets and making sure that they’re safe to consume. There were things that we were doing before COVID that suddenly became much more challenging, labour-intensive, thought intensive, once we were in the middle of the pandemic. I have to say that my team here at OVC and across campus has been remarkable. Watching how they've adapted to this- it hasn't been easy but I believe we have been successful.

Of course, I think that you hit on a lot of really important topics for those who might not know the veterinary profession has faced a lot of unique challenges that other sectors didn't have. Of course, avian influenza and the labour shortages must have been very significant, especially in a time of crisis. Compared to other crises that you may have planned for, did you have any sort of crisis management that would have prepared you for a pandemic before COVID? I know things like avian influenza may have had a bit more preparation, but had you done any scenarios for a human pandemic?

Not really, we relied heavily on previous plans that we had put in place, oddly enough, strikes. Where labour unions made a certain portion of our labour force unavailable, and that sort of thing. We had policies around holiday and vacation periods and how we can constrict ourselves to emergency-only situations. So we sort of borrowed from a lot of other policies that we already had in place. Of course, having said that, we had some fairly specific directives coming from the provincial government outlining what we could and could not do. We had to often go to work to explain to the provincial government how veterinary medicine is an essential healthcare workforce, and how some of the exceptions made for human healthcare workers needed to be made for veterinarians as well. No one in Ontario wanted to think what it would be like for animals with health emergencies not to be able to be cared for. That was ultimately successful so we had to reinvent some things or invent some things that we didn’t think we’d ever have to do in the past. Largely borrowed significantly from other policies and scenarios that we planned for and tried to knit those together as a reasonable response to what was going on on the ground on any given day.

You bring up a really good point, that the Ontario provincial government didn't include you in the first few directives at the beginning which could be seen as a very big oversight on their part. I remember seeing in the news, the different groups of veterinarians that were making petitions. Hearing them coming forward to say how important veterinary medicine is, not only to cats and dogs and other house pets but to society as a whole too, in terms of food availability.

I should add that it's not just in the provision of Healthcare that we had to explain ourselves, but also in the training of our veterinary students. We were already in a severe veterinary workforce shortage before COVID. The thought that any of our students might be delayed in graduating and therefore further contributing to the shortage, was something that we didn’t want to face. We did have to go to the provincial government and internally on campus, at a time when we had significant lockdowns and there were no other University of Guelph students on campus. Our students were required to attend restricted laboratory and practical educational opportunities so that they could continue to progress through their program. We were very appreciative of the understanding that we received from the government and our campus leaders to permit us to lead our veterinary students in that way. Otherwise, we would be in a bigger pickle workforce-wise than we are now.

Yeah, that's a very good point, thank you for that. I have one more pre-covid question: How did the initial shutdown affect your own research? Were there any research projects that you were doing where you faced roadblocks that you experienced firsthand?

I personally didn’t have anything because the research I’m involved with, and the grad students that I support, are mostly doing non-laboratory-based research. They’re doing more of the work that you’re doing, sort of qualitative work. In most cases, those students could continue to collect their data and do so remotely. Certainly, many of the faculty members that I lead, dealt with some significant issues. Once again, I would say that as a campus, I don’t have evidence but from what I’ve heard, is that we took a particularly nuanced approach to manage the continuity research programs at this campus. I think our researchers were generally given more freedom to do what they needed to do to keep their research programs going, whilst also taking care of the public health concerns for their employees and grad students. So I think we did a good job, and I think we were more successful than others in trying to keep most, if not all, of our research programs moving forward during COVID. Whereas most other campuses had more of a hard shutdown.

That's a very good note to make, that the University of did have a good response, especially in research so thank you for pointing that out. In terms of the covid-19 impacts on learning, teaching, and research, how did you find online teaching or communicating with grad teams?

I think nobody would say it was great. I have often heard said that people, including myself, were often surprised that there were often some hidden benefits to online teaching and learning. Sometimes people, for instance, are more reluctant to speak out in a classroom setting and find the online channel more welcoming of their contribution. I’ve heard from both students and professors, but overall a 100% diet of online learning, I think most people would agree, is not ideal. We are humans and we like variety and diversity, and this wasn’t satisfying the need for that. I do want to acknowledge that there may have been some accessibility benefits. Especially given that we are in a public health emergency and some people simply didn’t feel comfortable coming or teaching on campus. All of those ideas are swirling away and I think it’ll take us a while to reflect on this experience, and how we can integrate remote learning into learning in the future. We’re doing that right now. People have not left behind what they have learned during COVID in their teaching. Many are applying it in innovative and creative ways that are great to see. I’ll be quite blunt, after we were a couple of years into it, our DVM students and I'm sure our grad students, vocally indicated their dissatisfaction with a lot of the way in which they were learning. We started having a series of virtual town halls with our students to try to figure out what we could do to try to resolve as many as possible we were given and dealing with. I think this is a very successful format for us as administrators and teachers to understand their experience of the learning environment. One of the things concerning DVM students, because it is such a practical training program, they were concerned that they weren’t getting the practical skills that they needed to graduate. We as teachers had spent a lot of time thinking about if we needed to cut down the number of labs or amount of time for labs, or even cohort them down to 10 students, which was considered a safe number at the time; how do we deliver these practical skills in a way that will prepare them? I won’t pretend that they were not short-changed in some areas. Perhaps they didn’t get experience in some areas that previous years had. We were convinced that what we were providing was sufficient for them to move on to the next stage in their learning. That was a discussion that was sometimes contentious as to what was what we could do, what we weren’t doing, what the students needed, and what they felt they needed. I think we successfully negotiated this over time. It is completely understandable that they would feel that they weren’t getting the proper experience at different times or were understandably anxious. As they moved into 3rd or 4th year, where they were given more responsibility around patient care, and they were concerned that they weren’t prepared enough for it. I think time is telling that they were well prepared. They’re great students and we have great teachers, and it has proven that it worked out ok even though it wasn’t an easy time for us.

I definitely agree with the point that you made about online learning, that there are definitely some benefits for accessibility but at the end of the day, I think it's in our human nature for most people to enjoy in person learning. I think you had a really interesting approach with using town halls as they must have been very beneficial to your students, to be hearing their direct opinions, thoughts, and experiences on it. I've had the privilege of meeting some of the phase 3 and 4 OVC students and they are incredible students. I was going to ask, what key experiences do you think they may have missed in rotations or clinical experiences that they would have been having before the pandemic?

I’ll preface this to say that the nature of veterinary medicine and human medicine, and how we construct that curriculum is done through something you may have heard of called competency-based education. This means that there is a series of competencies and skills that are agreed upon to be achieved during the four years of their training. They’re mutually agreed upon because the students are partners in this. Maybe it's opposed to some other disciplines we have a fairly structured and documented set of competencies that they’re assessed on as they go along. So I think I can confidently say that as the students progress through their years, they did achieve their competencies but under much more difficult circumstances. Certainly, we had to figure out ways to solve this. Instead of offering a lab in four sections, we had to offer it in 12 sections to meet the cohort number of 10 students. This meant we had to reduce the length of those labs to be reasonable. So it's completely understandable that the students felt that they were being short-changed changed and didn't have the same time. It forced us to look pedagogically and critically at what actually needed to be done in a person-to-person lab and in practical situations. Looking into what could be done in models and simulations, and what could be done from home, through remote learning. That, in itself, was not a bad thing, to go through that exercise. I think that it will, and it has, informed us of the inefficiencies in our learning going forwards. There were compromises that were made in the amount of time that there was face-to-face with the instructors, live animals, and that sort of thing. In the end, I think it was a beneficial exercise to go through that made us think critically about what is necessary in a way that we never would have done if we never had had the pandemic.

That’s really interesting to know that we're able to still meet the competency standards despite the challenges that the pandemic gave them. That's also really interesting that you're able to go back and sort of review the most important concepts and skills that they may need, so that's very interesting. So as far as you're able to explain, what would you say are the most challenging aspects of the pandemic for the animal hospitals? I know that you don't have as much involvement with them, but what would you be able to say in terms of the lack of students and labour shortages? If students weren’t able to get in there for rotations, what were some of the challenges that the animal hospitals had to face?

Through a combination of provincial regulations and one thing and another, our students’ work allowed us to continue to take their placements at our hospital. Activities within a rotation had to be modified somewhat to ensure safety and reduce the density of people in a given space. One of the more challenging things that were common in veterinary medicine across the world, was that we sort of went to this “curbside medicine’ model, where clients were not allowed in with their animals. This reduced the density of people in the teaching hospital, which was hard, it's hard for everyone. It was hard for the animals and the clients. Honestly, there might be some people who didn't mind not having clients, but you know, most veterinarians like to interact with their clients directly; Assuring them of what's going on and what's going to happen to their pet. To do that remotely or out in the parking lot was just not as satisfying for many of us. Certainly wasn't satisfying for the client and perhaps at times it was more stressful for the animals. So they were sort of practical things like that that impacted us quite significantly. Even more important than that, you know was the impact that the illness and people need to either care for themselves or others, that it had on our workforce. During most of the pandemic, we were probably working with a 20% workforce reduction in the hospital, and that just put a greater load on everyone that was there on that particular day, which was hard. Having said that, people were remarkable in how they stepped up and how they got the work done. Most people understood that this was a unique time, especially how long it went on and maybe continues to this day. We still have continued issues with people having perfectly justified absences from the workplace. This is a hands-on activity in the hospital, you just cannot do this job completely remotely. We just brought in some telemedicine and telehealth channels of communication with our clients that we use and continue to use. However, they can't replace everything in veterinary medicine. Some services were luckier than others, in that their services could adapt to the telemedicine format more easily. Diagnostic imaging or radiology, for instance, was something that adapted very quickly and so found a way to reduce the number of people that needed to be in the hospital in one day. For other services like critical care, you know, that’s not going to work. You need people on the ground. So we had to adapt and we did so as best we could.

I remember being with my cats and dogs going for outdoor appointments. It was a little funny in the spring and summer to be out there, and then in the winter, it was a little difficult to have those conversations with your veterinarian outside in the cold and the snow and everything. I think it's a testament to the perseverance of the veterinary profession, that you're able to make these adjustments where you can, despite the challenges you face. You bring up a really interesting point about the labour shortages and the need for telemedicine. Do you see telemedicine expanding further? As you mentioned, critical care is difficult to replace with telemedicine. Do you see an expansion in the telemedicine field, or expanding current vet programs to include more students?

If you polled veterinarians across North America before and after COVID, I think you would find the adoption of telehealth and telemedicine has grown over that time. Just because the pandemic is less emergent right now, it doesn’t mean that people have given away those tools. We, for instance, use a telemedicine triage service to speak with our clients about their concerns about their animals. This determines if it is important that they come in right then or not, which is really being utilized more and more. During COVID, it was to manage the caseload and to match our workforce with the timing of emerging cases. Now, at the other end of the pandemic, I think we’re going to continue to use some of those tools since they’ve been proven to be quite useful. It also gave the clients reassurance, with their concerns about their animal, if it’s an emergency or not.

I think that's a really good point to make, that experiences with telemedicine triage are really beneficial, especially in determining if a patient needs to go into a clinic or not, and I think it's brought a lot of reassurance to a lot of people. For my next question, did you face any unique challenges during the Omicron outbreak which occurred in December 2021? Were there any unique challenges from that outbreak since the world had sort of opened up and then went to a harsh closure? At least in Ontario.

I would say yes. I think up to that point we were sort of patting ourselves on the back and saying that we hadn’t identified a single case of transmission in our teaching or our hospital environment and we were thinking about how well we were doing. Then suddenly Omicron came along and it seemed like all of the public health steps we were taking, including masking and reducing cohorts of people, it sort of wasn’t enough anymore to reduce transmission. We started having active transmission in our hospital setting, and more recently when our students joined us again last fall. This led to a lot more disease among our teaching staff and in our classrooms and labs. So no, we weren’t as clever as we thought. The virus will always out wit us, so that was a good learning experience, and now we’ve had to manage this situation as everyone else has. So in the case of teaching, there are a lot more mixed modalities, hybrid teaching, and recording of lectures than there have been before. Making teaching materials available in different ways so that we can always accommodate different people who are out ill or recovering, and that isn’t a bad thing. It’s forced a bit of a tech revolution in the approach to teaching, which probably needed to happen anyways for accessibility reasons.

I can definitely agree with that with my own experience in my undergrad. I find that the hybrid option really helps to reduce the spread of the common cold, COVID, or even influenza. I think that it does help because people are able to stay home and not infect others, and it takes the pressure off of me to not go to class if I am feeling sick. I definitely agree that the hybrid options are beneficial to students. Looking at returning to work, when we begin returning to normal lives as pandemic restrictions eased, how did it begin to change your work? Did measures affect your research or your ability to work in person? Or did you stay in the same conditions that you worked in before?

I think everyone's experienced a slow but steady change. it wasn't really one day where everything went back to normal. There's no doubt that we continue to have a number of our meetings remotely. There are obviously pandemic-related absences and other changes to the workflow, so we decided hybrid or remote meetings are going to be a feature of our life moving forward, in a way that they weren’t pre-COVID. Other activities have fully adapted, obviously in common with other offices on campus. We have encouraged our staff, especially those with front-facing roles, to be at work and share duties where they can, to be at work at least 50% of the time, to office share and that sort of thing. These things weren't on our radar pre-COVID but are now a routine part of how we work. I’m no expert on business management or anything like that, but this kind of flexibility has been recommended in the workplace for decades. We as a university may have been a bit slow to adopt them, while others have been even slower, which I'm not criticizing. Now we are adopting them and I think it's a good thing. Once again for accessibility, there are many things that might provide to people with impediments. We can offer some flexibility to the way we work where that's possible and the role permits it. I think faculty have had probably more flexibility than staff, so it makes me feel better that they are also receiving that flexibility as well.

That’s really interesting and I really like that you bring up the advantages of flexibility that we gained from the pandemic. For you personally, how comfortable were you with returning to work in person? Did your opinion change on this over time?

I can't speak for everyone, but a lot of people are sort of conflicted on this. Of course, we all wanted to get back to work and it was such a wonderful novelty to have meetings with people in person again and I think the novelty hasn't even worn off yet. And yet, because most of the people at OVC have medical or research training, we also were cognisant of the changing evidence for safety in the workplace. We were anxious about that just like everyone else. Maybe more so maybe less so, I don’t know. We have a diversity of opinions within our own faculty and staff. Even though we’ve all had medical training, the range of opinions that we had among our people was pretty reflective of society as a whole. We had to negotiate that and make sure that in whatever you are doing, you allowed for a level of comfort that people had in returning to work. Obviously, in the early days, we had provincial mandates around those things and so we had to follow those. When those were resolved, we had to come up with internal working policies in their place, and we’ve largely followed the lead of the academic leaders on campus. I don’t think anyone will say we got it perfect every time, but we were honestly trying to balance a lot of different needs. I know that generally speaking, it’s hard to find anyone to say we got everything right, but that’s often the case. When everyone is just a little bit unhappy, you’ve probably got it right because you’re trying to satisfy the needs, goals, and aspirations of such a diversity of people. I think we’ve put into place what we need to allow people to continue to do their work and feel safe doing so. We have been compassionate enough to open the conversation to individual needs and tried to accommodate them as we went along.

Having that different perspective in your field of that medical background, it adds to the variety of comfort levels of returning to work. Circling back to the labour load issues that we were talking about, from what I've read, veterinarians and registered veterinary technicians (RVTs) were invited to volunteer in the rollout of vaccines. When vets and RVTs began volunteering in the vaccine rollout, did they have any detrimental impacts on the ongoing labour issue?

No, there were not sufficient people needed that it would impact us. We made sure that when public health Ontario reached out to faculty and students, that it would be completely on a voluntary basis. They had an overwhelming response. I think in the first twenty-four hours, seventy-five people said they would like to help, and I think in the end they probably needed twelve or fifteen. So there was no problem there. I think it was great, I believe it was a real breakthrough for Public Health Ontario to consider using a group of trained people in this way who were not a traditional group that they would call upon. I do hope that we will learn from that and have something more formally put in place for emergencies similar to this so that it would be more automatic than it would be re-invented each time. That goes true for our animal health diagnostic lab. We spent quite a number of months talking to the province about whether the animal health lab could be used for COVID diagnostic testing. However, because we hadn’t done the work ahead of the emergency to establish what would be required for that to happen, it couldn’t happen in a timely way. I hope we will learn from that and do the work during peacetime when we don't have disease emergencies, so that our wealth of highly trained individuals and infrastructure that we have here in Ontario can be used to benefit both animals and humans in future situations.

I really like that you bring up the very unique relationship that the veterinary field has with public health because they really can work together. I guess when they don't have those connections built before the crisis it's hard to implement them, so I'm glad that you brought that up. I was really interested in learning more about that because it makes perfect sense. I do find it interesting that they didn't have that plan in place beforehand but I'm glad that there's continued work with them. Looking at the veterinary medicine field as a whole, what lasting impact on the field do you anticipate seeing as a result of the pandemic? As students experienced a different educational environment from past generations, even though they still met competency standards, do you see a lasting effect on the field from the pandemic?

As difficult as the pandemic was, and as tragically as it affected individuals and families, largely the legacy of the pandemic, if I may say it, is a positive one. It has forced the profession to be much more creative and to really question why we do things the way we do and ask, are there better ways of doing them? Many things that we were questioning and learning are related to the things we've spoken about. How do we offer veterinary services more efficiently? How do we train veterinary students more efficiently? What's really important and what isn't? How do we make use of technologies such as remote learning, telemedicine and telehealth? How do we address the workforce shortage? There was a workforce shortage before COVID, but it became far more acute during COVID and it forced us, and the provincial government across Canada, to really examine their needs in the veterinary world. In many cases, provinces have taken action in the past 12 months and provided extra support to ensure that our veterinary workforce is closer to what's needed in the coming decades. So these are all positive outcomes and things that probably needed to happen but because of the crisis we found ourselves in, I think it will position our profession, society, and the care of animals in a better position going forward. So it’s the old story. In every crisis, there's something positive that comes out of it, if only just to understand ourselves better.

I find it really interesting that you bring up the provincial government's role in working with the veterinary field. From what I've read, the University of Alberta has gotten more funding I believe from the Alberta provincial government to increase class sizes at their veterinary program. Is there any way that you can see the Ontario government helping the Ontario Veterinary College or the field of veterinarians in a similar way?

Absolutely. I think pretty much every province has considered and offered for this support for the veterinary profession across Canada in the last little while, and I'm sure the Ontario government is considering the same thing. We’re very optimistic that they are considering coming forward in the same way. We’re optimistic that they’ll step forward with some support as we certainly had indicated to them the certain support that we needed and they're considering that.  So we're very optimistic that something will happen there.

That's really good to hear. One more question, in what ways do you see any safety measures sort of evolving within the veterinary field? For example, we talked about telemedicine being something that you wanted to continue to implement in the field. Do you see any other safety measures to continue to use? I know that outdoor appointments might not be as functional as in-person appointments, but do you see any more room for growth coming from the covid-19 pandemic?

In a general sense, I think public and private organizations, that employ veterinarians, veterinary technicians, and staff to offer primary health care, are much more conscious of the safety of their teams and clients now, so it's really put that into sharp focus. I think a culture of public health safety is now in place, whether we like it or not, we're going to be better at doing that, and we're going to be more conscious about during periods of disease transmission. We’ll take better care of controlling the density of people we have in a space, air quality, the role of masking, and other public health initiatives on transmission. I think all of us were gratified that we didn't have a cold or flu for three years. In many cases, it was the biggest natural experiment we have ever had to find what factors are important in virus transmission. Hopefully, we'll continue to understand and implement those things in our workplaces. We’re going to be a lot more understanding about workplace absences. When it comes to you know, I think veterinarians, technicians, and others, are the same as everyone else: very prone to come to work when we're sick because we feel obligations both for our colleagues and patients. I think there's more understanding now, that now when you're sick you should stay home. The net benefit of staying home is far greater than coming to work when you're ill. So there's a culture change as much as anything, and I think that will be retained post-COVID.

It's really good to hear that you have that understanding nature being implemented into the field.  Just coming to our last couple of questions, what would you do differently, personally, if you were able to approach the pandemic again? Either in the way you ran your life, or how you dealt with the OVC handling the pandemic? I know the OVC had an amazing response to it after everything that we’ve discussed. Is there anything that you would do differently?

Well, I think any organization probably should have scenario-planning events for emergencies, and I think if we were to have such a thing in the future, we now would include this kind of infectious disease emergency that has gone on sort of over the last few years. We would make the changes in scenario planning so we’re better prepared to roll into action and not forget some of the things that we've learned from this period. Another issue I’ve dealt with personally as a leader, is not just protecting my people from infectious diseases but protecting and supporting them in a sort of discourse. In social media and in other arenas. As I said, in our college, we had full diversity of opinions. We had Covid and public health measures that were being implemented including vaccines, masking, and what have you; As a dean, I have responsibilities for the oversight of discourse that happens at the college and on our own channels of communication, on email and our own websites. It's been a real struggle to understand what my role as the leader of this campus might be in the oversight of social media discourse on private accounts, some of which continues to be rather harmful. The individuals have come forward with real concerns about the discourse on social media, and these are usually not University accounts but you know personal accounts, but they definitely include commentary that has to do with a person's role as an employee at the University of Guelph. I'd like to sort of resolve that. As a university, we can be a little bit behind in terms of our policies and practices around social media, as well as other modern forms of technology. So I think that's something that we will continue to think about having had this experience. How difficult it has been, and how do we manage that better?

I'm really glad that you brought up social media. I didn't think to ask about that, but you're very right. There are so many different challenges that were thrown at you from the pandemic, and social media wouldn’t have been thought of as an impact when you're being hit from every side. It must have been very challenging to deal with social media as a new issue as well. For the final question, I was wondering, how did the pandemic change your relationship with your job? Do you still view it in the same way?

I don’t think it changed my relationship with my job, but it has brought a few things onto my agenda to deal with as an academic leader that I didn't have on my list before. Most recently, as we just mentioned before, around protecting my people and making sure that our workplace is healthy and psychologically supportive for everyone. In respect for the need for academic freedom balanced against the need to ensure that people are not feeling anxious or threatened. That's a new thing on my list that perhaps wasn't quite so prominent in the past. So it's an evolution and I certainly learned a lot from it from this experience.

I just want to say thank you so much for your time and for participating in this interview! I have learned so much and I'm sure that it'll prove to be a very useful interview when we look back on the pandemic and how the University of Guelph and the Ontario Veterinary College responded to it. It will also be useful in studying how the field of veterinary medicine is going to be moving forward and how they were able to respond to the pandemic. Before I end, I just want to say thank you very much for your time.

Well thanks, Kate for including me in this, I’m sure it’s going to be a very useful piece of work, recording this.

Of course, thank you!