Those of us working in the animal welfare field want to improve access to veterinary care (AVC) across the nation, however there is a lot we don't know about how to best accomplish this. Through research we can learn how to construct and deliver highly effective and accessible veterinary care programs across the nation.
Harnessing the expertise of veterinarians, sheltering and other animal welfare experts who are heavily involved in AVC, we collectively identified the 20 questions with the greatest potential to inform and advance our work in access to veterinary care so that we can focus our research efforts on the topics that will have the greatest impact on AVC.
You can read more about this work on the ASPCA's Pro page and here is a link to the paper itself.
A primary goal of this work was to encourage researchers to focus their efforts on the questions that have the greatest potential to advance AVC and for organizations to fund this priority research. Individuals who may not be actively engaged in research, but who implement AVC programs, can also use this list of priority questions to better understand what they know and don't know about those programs, and what knowledge gaps to fill to better target and deliver services. Organizations can identify information they already have or could readily collect and analyze to shed light on some of these questions and identify future directions for their work based on data they already have. Organizations working in AVC can also partner with researchers to evaluate and improve their AVC programming while simultaneously providing the field with answers to these critical questions.
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Sharon Pailler
Research DIrector
ASPCA
Northborough MA
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