LAKEWOOD, Colo.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Veterinary Visionaries™ is launching its first concept-solving event on May 1-27, 2022 addressing pervasive and rarely discussed issues among veterinary teams — mental health, psychological wellbeing, and suicide prevention. Through an innovative, crowdsourcing platform, everyone in the veterinary field is encouraged to actively explore and submit approaches to answering this question:
How might we build systemic solutions and support for veterinary teams to continuously improve mental wellbeing, especially related to moral distress, ethical trauma, and compassion resilience?
At the event’s conclusion, a panel of mental health and veterinary professionals will evaluate all submissions based on criteria of feasibility, activation logistics, and cost. Cash awards will be presented to the top four innovators, which will be announced on July 1, 2022. Based on the winning idea, an appropriate committee will be convened to build an action plan.
Veterinary Visionaries™, includes more than 50 organizations that support the profession including the American Animal Hospital Association, American Veterinary Medical Association, American College of Veterinary Surgeons, and Not One More Vet.
"Veterinary Visionaries was founded to bring veterinary associations’ and higher-education organizations’ collective memberships together to share ideas, co-create solutions, and unify our profession’s approach to solving shared challenges," said Garth Jordan, CEO of AAHA and a founding member of Veterinary Visionaries. "We quickly identified mental health as a major challenge in our field, and one that deserves more than a fragmented approach to solve. If we all get into the same space to collectively pool our thoughts, we’ll ideate powerful solutions that can greatly enhance the field and those who contribute to it."
“The veterinary industry is not unusual in having multiple organizations working in parallel on the same problem. Bringing these organizations together to reach their collective memberships and reach tens of thousands of stakeholders is not only novel but creates a unique opportunity to address and solve some of the issues facing the veterinary community,” states Dr. Chris Gray VetMB, MA, MBA, MRCVS, CEO, Veterinary Emergency and Critical Care Society.
The Spring 2022 Solving Event is generously supported by Boehringer Ingelheim, CareCredit, and IDEXX Laboratories.
About Veterinary Visionaries
Established in 2021, Veterinary Visionaries is a collaboration of veterinary associations and higher education organizations bringing their collective memberships together to share ideas, co-create solutions, and unify the professions' approach to solving shared challenges. Learn more at veterinaryvisionaries.org.
