Take time to connect at Vetpol ®…(posted by Caroline and Jeremy Johnson)
In business as you get older you become conscious of two important things….firstly how little time you’ve got and secondly the fact that for both social and business reasons you should spend more time networking…because that’s really how you get jobs, referral business, business growth generally. And whilst we know we should network and connect to others outside our immediate sphere of influence, the dilemma is that we don’t have enough time!
At www.vetpol.co.uk we have a new facility that allows the whole veterinary community to connect, from experienced clinicians right through to front-of-house staff such as receptionists. Unlike Facebook we screen each individual user joining the site…and we don’t ask you to give up the copyright in your images or whatever else you post…but like Facebook you can communicate with others, upload photos and get to know others in the veterinary community at a time that suits your life and fits in with your own time-commitments.
Having screened out the spammers and spreaders of malware, we apply as few restrictions as we can get away with. We know that even in business people mainly want to network for social reasons, to make their working lives more enjoyable and because they want to belong to supportive networks. Yet we don’t ban use of the site for more overt business purposes…many people in the veterinary want to connect to other people who can help them.
Our principal interest is veterinary business. But we struggle to draw the distinction between ‘business topics’, for example trends in surgery such as ovariectomy versus ovariohysterectomy, as these are the bread and butter of veterinary practice; or medicines deregulation and twenty-four-hour cover as such matters disproportionately affect both the viability of large animal veterinary business as we knew it twenty years or thirty years ago and future opportunities for large animal clinicians. And still many in the veterinary community don’t manage to look at the “bigger picture” issues, discuss their collective view and commit them to the policy debate because they have practices to run: they struggle even to find time to do CPD and connect to others who can help them deal with veterinary business as we find it today.
So get on-line, register at www.vetpol.co.uk and connect to the people you want to connect with. And from time to time we may ask you to contribute to a poll so that your view is not lost in the ether!
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