Good evening everyone. It's Anthony Chadwick from the webinarett. I hope you've had a good rest between 4 and 7, maybe you had a chance to see the exhibition and of course, go into the Hoover app.

Today's Association's Day, and I'm really pleased to have had so many associations being involved in the 6 hours that we presented earlier. Obviously the main conference has been going on all week and will continue tomorrow, but one of my favourite sessions every year is the Royal College Mind Masses initiative symposium, which we've done, I think, for the last 4 or 5 years. And this year we're going to be talking about the power of exercise and also some sessions later on, about some of the grants that have been given out by the Royal College's Mind Masters initiative.

Also, thank you for all the sponsors who've made the conference possible as well. Our first speaker today is Fergus Mitchell. He's going to be talking about the power of exercise.

Fergus is a 3rd year student at the University of Nottingham, famous for going around the London Marathon course in fancy dress. We're going to see some photographs, so I won't spoil the fun too much, and Fergus is going to be talking about the power of exercise in improving wellbeing. I think we all kind of inherently know that this should help, but Fergus will touch on his undergraduate research at the University of Nottingham, which analysed the effects of an exercise programme on veterinary students' mental well-being.

And we'll also discuss his thoughts on the topic. Fergus, I'm really looking forward as a aficionado of exercise to see what you've got to say, so it's over to you. Brilliant.

Thank you very, very much, Antony. A kind introduction and, thank you to all the webinar vet team for all their support and help over the last couple of weeks. I really appreciate it.

So, yeah, Anthony's right. Tonight, I'm, talking about the power of exercise. And my first slide here is a couple of learning objectives.

So, thank you very much for joining me tonight. I will introduce myself further in a minute or so and talk about that marathon escapade. But perhaps whilst we may be waiting for a couple of others to join still, here are the learning objectives for my talk this evening.

It's fairly informal, nothing too strenuous and nothing that should boggle your mind a bit, but hopefully these learning objectives, will provoke some thought and some conversation over the next 45 minutes. Perhaps as we go through the slides, try and apply some of the thoughts and ideas to yourself, your friends, and colleagues, or perhaps practising veterinary professionals in whatever capacity that may be. And thank you to anyone who has submitted a question already by the Hoover app.

I will do my best to address these at the end, and I believe, I think there should be a question and answer function. Someone correct me if I'm wrong. So if there's any questions, please do ask them and keep them for the end.

So before we go anywhere, as I said, it's a, a fairly informal session tonight, so I'd like to start by breaking the ice a little bit and telling you who I am. My name is Fergus Mitchell, and I'm a 3rd year in Nottingham vet student. It's Friday night, and this is a very informal session.

So, I'll just, give you a little bit of background of myself. So, I'm from Newbury, just south of Oxfordshire, near Downton Abbey for anyone interested. Although it's not really Downton Abbey.

And these are a few of my interests coming up. I'm very, very interested in mental health and well-being. I'm interested in sport, anything with a ball or anything I can shout out on the TV.

And, finally, as you can see in my left, the left picture here, my lurcher, womble. I wouldn't be allowed home if I didn't shout her out, but, she likes to run very fast and equally loves to lie on a sofa. Excuse the silly photo on the right, as, Anthony alluded to.

Last year, I took part in the virtual London Marathon. I was a little bit naive and thought that it wasn't hard enough as it is. And so I decided to do it as an inflatable draught suit.

Just as a warning to anyone, I was chatting to Anthony and the a minute ago, but, don't do it in an inflatable draught suit that costs 30 miles, 30 pounds because it'll, only stay inflated for about 3 miles, and the other 23 miles will be carrying it around with you. But that's a little bit of, oh, I run it ran it for mind, but, that's my sort of icebreaker to get us going today. So why thank you for coming and thank you for joining this evening, and you're probably wondering who's this 3rd year vet student and why are they qualified to give this talk at the infamous webinar vet virtual congress?

Well, to be honest with you, I'm not. But I don't believe that really matters too much. I don't have any letters behind my name.

I haven't spent years and years researching the topic, and I'm not particularly well known. But does that matter? Personally, for me, not Particularly.

And I'm not here to belittle anyone who has done lots of amazing research, as you've seen across the virtual Congress week. There are some many, many amazing people, who have a lot to say about their specialism and niche, and I think that's incredible. However, for me, this talk tonight comes from a slightly different perspective.

I won't be revolution revolutionising day to day veterinary life, nor will I be telling you anything that, in all honesty, you probably don't know already. But the key thing for me is that I'm, I'm incredibly passionate about this topic, and it was too big an opportunity to let up. Yes, I'm still at vet school.

Yes, I'm not even into the clinical years yet. So I appreciate, I really can't speak from a vet to vet nurse or professional's perspective. However, I do believe that my main aim of talking to you tonight is essentially to share my passion for this topic with you and hope to provoke some meaningful conversation.

So I've gone on enough about this topic and kind of skirted around the edges, but let's get going and I'll stop waffling. So, today, I'm here to talk to you about the power of exercise. I do have a little bit of research to back up what I'm talking about.

And, my research was a 3rd year dissertation project just last year, and we looked into the effects of an exercise programme on the mental well-being of veterinary students. I will talk you through my dissertation. And then I'll highlight some of the conclusions drawn from it.

And then finally, at the end of this talk, I'll go on to talk about my opinions and where I'd like to see things going, with regards to mental health, student life, exercise, and the veterinary profession as a whole. So before I go any further, obviously we are a part of association day to day, and I owe a huge thank you to the Mind Matters Initiative team of the RCVS. I have a couple of thank yous to do throughout my presentation tonight.

However, Mind Matters gave us the initial funding required to get the ball rolling with our research and have since given me the chance to write a blog for their website, and now this hour to talk to you tonight. So thank you very much, Lisa and Lizzie and the rest of the team at the Royal College for all of your support. I really do appreciate it.

Before we go on, I'd just like to warn you that the next couple of slides, I will be talking about upsetting content, including suicide. So if you'd rather meet me for a few minutes, then, please do so, and it shouldn't be more than a few minutes. OK, so this slide doesn't paint the prettiest picture for our profession.

Unfortunately, it's well known that the veterinary profession has an association with poor mental well-being and mental health. It is very well known that the suicide rate in the profession is approximately 4 times the general population, and I don't think we should be brushing over that. It is real, and incredibly saddening.

There are multiple factors, many researched and many anecdotally that can contribute to these, high levels of poor mental wellbeing, such as euthanasia, high demands and means to drugs are often cited, but there are many, many more. The bottom two points on this slide refer to veterinary students and cropped up in literature when I was completing my dissertation. There are multiple stresses for students, non-veterinary and veterinary, and the levels of depression and anxiety for veterinary students are similar to other medical courses, but worse than the general population.

And I find that very, very interesting. I believe it is crucial that mental health, wellbeing, and resilience are harnessed from a young age in veterinary students. It is something that will become more and more apparent as general society continues to open up about these topics and have these difficult conversations, but that's where my motivations come from.

These two headings again are just to further highlight the prevalence of systemically poor mental well-being throughout our profession. They're from two separate papers found when analysing literature, and both of the quotes stuck with me. By no means does poor mental health represent everyone associated with our profession.

However, I don't think that it's useful to shy away from the topic and the fact that poor mental health is prevalent among veterinary professionals and students alike. These quotes further compound the fact for me that it's a chronic problem within the profession, and it does need to be and is being tackled from the roots up. Unfortunately, there is no magic wand.

However, I will go on to a few ideas in a minute. And finally, on this slide, I'd like to share with you this recent article from Horse and Hound magazine. I think it's from November last year.

And it just show, it just goes to show that, it's very, very well known about the prevalence of poor mental well-being within the profession. And I just wanted to highlight that. As for coping strategies, well, today, I'm going to talk about my passion, and that's exercise.

So why is exercise good for us? I'm hoping this slide won't patronise anyone. It's not intending to do that, especially a double, triple marathon runner like, like Anthony.

However, I think it's very, very important to actually consider why exercise is good for us. We hear it constantly bandied around in the media, and this has been amplified with COVID. However, sometimes the reasons are missed off.

So firstly, exercise reduces the risk of stress, anxiety and depression. I've avoided going into the detailed physiology because there'll be, a lot of people to pick holes in my science. However, obviously, if you'd like to know more, there are many online resources.

These bullet points are just taken from Mind, the, mental health charity. But I think they're very, very good at summarising why exercise is so good for us. Secondly, exercise boosts mood.

And allows for better self-esteem. Exercise also allows people to connect with each other, leads to better sleep. However, there is a caveat that these bullet points may not apply to everyone, and some of them may be more relevant to others.

So, take, take what I say with a pinch of salt in that regard. However, I think it's important to highlight why exercise is so good for us and why exercise does have a positive, positive, a positive effect on mental well-being. So, how much do you exercise?

I think hopefully, Pam will be able to pull up a pole in a minute, but, and I can have a little drink and a bit of a breather. But just so you know. The NHS minimum guidelines for exercise are that adults should do at least 150 minutes of moderate intensity activity a week, or 75 minutes of vigorous intensity activity a week.

Moderate intensity means you can talk, but can't sing whilst doing the activity, and, and vigorous. The activity means you can't really talk, very scientific, I know. But that gives you a rough idea of what the minimum guidelines are for adults.

So, with this in mind, Pam, Pam, hopefully will be able to get up the pole. But, please let me know, do you wish that you exercised more? I'm hoping that a few votes are coming in.

I can't see anything on my screen, but. I can read those out to you, Fergus, when people have finished voting. That would be great, thank you.

So, so 58% wish they were exercising more. 15% said no, and then 27% said sometimes, so presumably they do on occasions exercise enough, but then at other times they don't. Brilliant, thank you.

And they've just come up on my screen, so thank you for that, Antony. And I think it's very interesting, and as Antony pointed out, there is no right or wrong answer, and it's, very often that circumstance can change, how much you exercise or how much you wish to exercise. And so all of that is taken into consideration, but it is only a yes no poll.

However, I think it's very interesting that 58% of us, responded with yes. Now I'd like to show you a quote which really stuck with me when I read it. If exercise were a pill, it would be one of the most cost effective drugs ever invented.

Oh, I've lost control of my mouth. And that is from Doctor Nick Cavill, and he's a, NHS consultant specialising in public health and health improvement. And you might have seen his name once or twice before.

But that, that quote really stuck with me when I found it, and so I wanted to share it with you. So I've just gone over a few of the positive effects that exercise can have, for us, for our mental wellbeing, for our physical health. And now I'd like to talk to you about my dissertation in a little bit more detail.

So here are the aims of my dissertation, and the aims were to investigate the effects an 8 week exercise programme had on the mental wellbeing of first year female University of Nottingham veterinary students. Admittedly, it doesn't roll off the tongue, but hopefully you get the general gist. So I'd like to make something clear and a little confession, if I may.

Our exercise programme at Nottingham was definitely not the first of its kind, nor the first in the veterinary field. However, it has been adapted from other exercise programmes, and I'd like to talk to you a little bit about them first. So, the top one.

He is the Medwell programme. And that was, took place at the University of Limerick and involved 1 and 2nd year medical students who undertook a six-week exercise programme to establish the feasibility of using exercise as an intervention to, promote health and well-being amongst their students. The programme was found to be beneficial to the students, although it would be beneficial to have more controlled trials.

I thought that was very interesting because it looked at 1st and 2nd year medical students, similar to the age group of our students here at Nottingham. The second one is an exercise programme, from the University of Pretoria in South Africa. And that exercise programme was a little bit different, because it looked at the, the effect of the exercise programme on pregnancy diagnosis accuracy in final year students.

It is a very, very interesting paper to read. And I think, the, exercise programme actually led to increased accuracy with regards to pregnancy diagnosis. However, there were some side findings, from that study, including that the students found it to be a good stress release and fun.

Finally, I've highlighted the vetIt study here, but I'm going to talk a little bit more about it on the next slide. Say Vetit were very much the inspiration for our study, and our study design was based off their work. Back in 20 October 2019, when we could do fun things like eating pizza in lecture theatres, if you find that fun.

I attended a talk by Charlie May, Charlie Mays and Andy Rose, from VetFIt. And, they conduct, and they talked about the study that they conducted at the RBC, in 2018. So they conducted a study at RBC which looked into how an eight-week training programme affected fitness and mental well-being of a cohort of 3rd year students.

Their work really was the inspiration for my study. And, since that talk back in October 2019, we have met a few times and kept in contact about my dissertation and study, and they've been really, really supportive of me. Off the back of their work, they've evolved vet fit into a business, and I, massively urge you to check it out.

They're promoting really important matters around exercise and being a vet, working with practises all over the country, and their work is invaluable. I believe they're holding a session, at the congress tomorrow. So I highly encourage you to join and check out if you can.

But just a little shout out to that fits, say thank you for all their support and their, their, their, my study design was really based from theirs. So moving on to our study a little bit more, the participation criteria for the exercise programme, were these, these four points. So, The students obviously had to be vet students at the University of Nottingham.

We opted for female students who, didn't own a gym membership and were self-perceived non-exercises. The reason we chose female students was because, we didn't want there to be a, A barrier due to gender. And the reason we chose, self-perceived non-exercises, which, we gave them the definition from the NHS about the minimum exercise levels in adults.

And if they, perceive themselves to exercise less than that, then they could come along and join. And also, not only a gym membership, so we knew they weren't already participating in sports teams, on our campus here in Nottingham. And that way, it gave us a good, a good base and a good starting point that everyone had a, everyone could work off, and then we could see how the, how the exercise programme really affected them over the eight weeks.

Here are a few more programme details. So, it was an 8-week programme, and it, started early last year and finished sort of just before COVID things kicked in here in the UK. We had 12 participants join the programme.

There were 3 sessions per week, one hit session, so that's high intensity interval training, one introduction to sports session, which included sports such as rugby, football, which is pictured there. Netball, badminton, running, and other sports. Those sessions were kindly run by relevant society members from our campus.

And then we had a student-led stretching session. Unfortunately, 22 sessions were cancelled and 11 of that was due to COVID just towards the end of our programme, but we're very, very lucky to get it in before. So in terms of data collection, we gave the participants 3 questionnaires.

Questionnaire one was given to the participants before the programme. Questionnaire 2 was given halfway through the programme, and questionnaire 3 was given at the end of the programme. Each of the questionnaires included a 14 item Warwick Edinburgh mental wellbeing scale.

This is pictured on the right of our screen here. So the Warwick Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scale is validated for individual use and for use in the in our profession. It was developed to enable the measuring of mental wellbeing in the general population and the evaluation of projects, programmes, and policies which aim to improve mental wellbeing.

The, the photo is an example of one of the scales, and the items, as you can see at the top, are all worded positively. And cover both feeling and functioning aspects of mental well-being. The scale has been widely used nationally and internationally.

Furthermore, each, each questionnaire included, free response questions, which were written by my supervisor and myself. The idea behind the free response questions was to gauge how the participants viewed the programme and then their state and mental well-being. Finally, questionnaires 2 and questionnaire 3, so the one halfway through the programme and after the programme included 5.

Like at scale surveys. And these 5. Like at scale surveys were used to quickly assess the participants' views on different parts of the programme, what they expected from the programme, and, why they were continuing with it.

So in terms of data analysis. We focused on the changes in the individual Warwick Edinburgh mental wellbeing scale scores from the first questionnaire to the last. So the maximum score you can get using the scale, which represents, the best, the most positive wellbeing, is 70, and the minimum representing poorer well-being is 14.

According to the user guide, if focusing on individual changes in school rather than the general population, then any changes of 3 to 7 points. Were called possibly meaningful changes, and any individual changes of eight or more points, were unequivocally meaningful. Unfortunately, due to the small sample size, we did not carry out any statistical tests in alignment with the guide, which suggested a minimum number of 30 participants needed to do so.

And then the 5 point like it scale surveys, we, I represented them as stat graphs, which I will show you in a minute and, talk about a little bit more in a minute. So not only did we have that quantity of data, we also had some qualitative data, because we had the free response questions, throughout all three questionnaires. So, I analysed the three response, questions, thematically, in a reflexive approach as described by Braun and Clark.

I used inductive and deductive methods, and what happens is you take the text and create codes. These codes then form a codebook, which then get the codes in the codebook then get formed into sub themes and themes. The qualitative data was co-analyzed by my dissertation supervisor, just to check for consistency.

So now I'd like to share with you some results from the data. So this slide shows the results from the Warwick Edinburgh mental wellbeing scales. The, the chart, the table on the left is representative of how the individuals scores change from the beginning to the end of the project.

So, 5 had an unequivocally meaningful positive well-being change. 2 had a possibly meaningful positive well-being change. 3 participants had no meaningful change, and 1 participant had a possible meaningful negative well-being change.

You might add them up and notice that that only totals 11. Unfortunately, one participant didn't, fill out the last questionnaire. And so we only have 11 scores for our Warwick Edinburgh, mental well-being scale.

The graph on the right, although I mentioned that we didn't analyse the group change as a whole, or whether it was statistically significant or not, it's just here to demonstrate the, the general trend in well-being scores over the three questionnaires. And as you can see, they went up each time. The next slides are going to, look at the graphs that represent the response to the 3 like it scale surveys we used.

So this is the first like it scale survey and it focused on motivations as to why the participants signed up and continued to participate in the programme. We, we put this like it scale survey in both questionnaire 2 and questionnaire 3. So I'd like to highlight, this middle one here.

The participants appeared to enjoy spending time with each other, at the top and time with the organisers of the day to day runnings of the programme. It was always also apparent, if you look at the bottom few that they felt an obligation to the organisers, to themselves, and to each other to continue, attending the programme. And the one in the middle is the crucial one for me, and I've circled it here.

22 out of 23 responses across the two questionnaires agreed or strongly agreed to enjoying the programme. And for me, that was really positive because we wanted to make it an enjoyable process and something that the participants were happy to be a part of and wanted to be a part of. And so I'd like, I wanted to draw your attention to that one.

This like it scale survey was a component of the final questionnaire only, and it focused on how the programme fared in comparison with the students' expectations of the programme. So, in this one, I've highlighted two components, which mostly exceeded the student's expectations. These were the quality of the introduction to sports sessions and the quality of the hit sessions.

This like a scale survey would be incredibly useful to anyone here at the University of Nottingham or, in other scenarios where looking to do similar projects because it highlights room for improvement and, I think it's always important to take on feedback. You might notice as well that we had a life coaching session too, and the idea behind that was to give the participants an opportunity to reflect on the programme at approximately week 6 and look towards the future to in terms of what they would, take away from the programme. But as I said, the, the quality of the introduction to sports sessions and hit sessions, exceeded expectations the most.

And I think, great credit is due to the, the, the people who kindly offered to, run those sessions. So thank you very much. Finally, and for me, this is the most important like at scale survey, and, it was, a part of the questionnaire 3 at the end of the programme.

And it focused on the impact of the programme on the participants' mental wellbeing. Again, like I mentioned earlier, we were one participant down, when filling out this final questionnaire. However, it was really, really pleasing to see that the other 11 felt that the programme had positively affected their wellbeing.

Again, at the bottom, one of the points, that I find very interesting is the my social life improved question. And the fact that many participants felt that their social life improved as a direct result of the programme, was really encouraging to see, and something that I will touch on a little bit more as we continue. So although the like it scales and the Warwick Edinburgh mental well-being scores, they suggested that the programme had a positive effect on the participants and on, and on their mental wellbeing as a whole.

However, we also wanted to dig a little deeper, especially with the free response questions and give the participants a voice, rather than just ticking a box to depict how they felt. So this is where the reflexive thematic analysis comes in. And as I mentioned earlier, I coded the responses and then grouped them into a codebook and then further into sub-thees and themes.

So this graphic on the right contains all the finalised sub themes and the 4 overarching themes they fell under. So the four themes were, firstly, at the top there at 12 o'clock, you can see awareness of mental well-being. So this really related to the participants showing a strong awareness of mental wellbeing as a concept, and also being aware of their own situation with regards to mental wellbeing, both positively and negatively.

It was very clear that some of the stresses associated with the university that I mentioned earlier, are still very much apparent. And often the participants made reference to the fact that they were keen to work on their personal wellbeing. So at 3 o'clock we have a sense of community.

This scene backs up the point I made earlier about the like it scales, where we saw participants felt an obligation to each other and enjoyed the fun and social aspect of the programme. This is something that I perhaps underestimated, and I underestimated the power of before my dissertation. I underestimated that alongside the structure of regular exercise, one of the real highlights for the participants was that sense of community that it created.

And again, I will touch on that a little bit later. At 12 o'clock we have appreciation of the importance of exercise, and I think this is a, given it was an exercise programme, a key one to get across. And, it, it was very pleasing to see that by the end participants really did appreciate the power of exercise.

And the 4th at 9 o'clock is suggestions for improvement. Finally, like with the like it scales, it would be incredibly ignorant of me to ignore the fact that there were suggestions for improvement with our study. And, if there were to be studies similar to ours, there could be ways of improving it.

For example, some felt the quality of some sessions could have been improved. And for others, they found it very hard to fit the sessions in around the 9 to 5 timetable. But unfortunately, that is sometimes a way of life, and not everything is possible for everyone at the same time.

But, of course, it's, really important to listen to those opinions. Now I'm just gonna show you some quotations, just so you know that I'm not, making all of this up. So these are some direct quotes that we took from, the participants' free response questions.

And it's just a snapshot of how they, fitted in under each theme. So, firstly, quotation one on awareness and mental well-being. I'm very happy when I'm in a routine, but I find weekends hard being away from home and having more time on my hands.

And this is just an example of some of the stresses that we mentioned earlier, that vet students, experience, especially as first-year vet students who may be finding them the transition into, isolation, living alone, quite difficult. Quotation two, talks about a sense of community. I think what I'm enjoying most is a fun and relaxed environment.

Everyone is super friendly, and I love that we can just have fun and give everything a go knowing that no one else in the group is going to judge you. And I think it's really, really key that a non-judgmental and safe environment was created for everyone to exercise in. Because personally, I'm talking from personal experience, I can I understand that, exercise and team sports and entering a gym even can be quite a daunting feat, especially if you aren't used to those situations and, chucking it in, in a university environment makes it even more daunting.

So I think the fact we had a non-judgmental and, and, fun environment was really key for me. Thirdly, appreciation of the importance of exercise. My studies take up a lot of time now, a lot of time, but now I know I can fit exercise in.

And that was an incredibly refreshing quote to read because it was almost as if there's a light bulb moment for this particular participant, where they clearly acknowledged that they found fitting in extracurricular activities like exercise around the 9 to 5 of vets school hard. But after the programme realised that it was still possible, and I think that's really, really important. Finally, suggestions for improvement.

As I said before, suggestions for improvement is always crucial, and it would be ignorant to ignore them. And so obviously, this student, found the timings quite hard, around lectures, and quite tight. So they perhaps ended up rushing around.

But I think it's very important to listen to those suggestions. So moving on, here are the four conclusions that I drew, from the quantitative and qualitative data and the study as a whole. So firstly, exercise have a positive effect on mental wellbeing.

This is quite a generalisation, but I think in our case it does ring true. I appreciate that there would have been many, many contributing factors throughout the eight weeks and not just our exercise programme. Not least to mention that the end of the exercise programme, sort of ended up tying in with the start of the COVID, COVID, oh, I don't know what to call it, COVID in the UK, and everything being locked down.

But positively, we saw that exercise programmes did have a positive effect on the participants' mental wellbeing. And I have been careful to say exercise programme, rather than just exercise in general, because that's what we were focusing on, at a vet student level. However, I'm sure it's a combination of the exercise plus other factors, which made it so.

Secondly, community matters. And I think this is really, really important and something which was personally unexpected on my behalf. I believe the exercise programme actually facilitated a mini community for the first year students and was actually a real contributing factor towards their mental wellbeing.

Unfortunately, as with lots of things, physical communities over the last year have taken a real hit. However, I do believe they will bounce back stronger than before, as COVID, moves to one side. But I think that's a very, very powerful conclusion.

Thirdly, it's very, very interesting that the participants' expectations were exceeded, and so if similar programmes were perhaps implemented at vet school levels, it'd be interesting to see how well received they'd be. Finally, a slight dampener on everything, but veterinary students still struggle. Now I'm not saying that, vet students are an anomaly to the world or to any other students out there at university.

However, as a vet student, I still think it's very important to highlight the fact that struggles, reference maybe over the last few decades, are still consistent today. I completely understand that some of the issues will always be there due to demanding workloads, pressures of EMS, and often perfectionist mindsets that veterinary students may have. However, I believe, even though we may not necessarily be able to tackle everything with a click of a fingers or one simple talk here or there, I think it's very useful to keep track of where we are as a profession.

And so I thought I'd just chuck that in there at the end. So, are these findings a surprise? And are these conclusions a surprise?

In all honesty, they're not. If you follow this link, it takes you to an NHS page with 5 steps to improve mental wellbeing. And when I look at these 5 steps, I personally identify 4 of them as being connected with our exercise programme.

Firstly, the first step is connect with other people. Simply, we connected 12 vet students who, on the whole, hadn't met one another before, and until we united them over a common goal of being involved in their exercise programme. Secondly, be physically active.

It slightly goes without saying, but the exercise programme included plenty of physical activity. Thirdly, learn new skills, as one of the criteria for participation in the programme was that the students didn't have a gym membership and weren't part of a sports team already. Naturally, the intro to sports sessions led to new skills, being learned, in their case.

Fourth, give to others, I haven't highlighted this one because it's a little bit more tenuous. However, I suppose there is an argument that by participating in the programme, they were giving to research, and as the like it scale surveys earlier suggested, the participants felt an obligation to one another and the organisers. So therefore you could argue that giving to others was a contributing factor to.

Finally, pay attention to the present moment. There was an element of mindfulness incorporated into the stretching sessions in the programme. And obviously we had the life coach session too.

However, I think the fact that participants had to fill out questionnaires at regular intervals, gave them a bit of an opportunity to reflect on themselves and their progress. And so, therefore, I highlighted, pay attention to the present moment, because I think that covers the point quite nicely. So there's definitely 4 out of 5 of these steps, included in our study, and perhaps even all 5, with a little bit of arguing and persuasion.

So now what? So, thank you very much for sticking with me, for the last half an hour or so. And that was a quick run through my dissertation, last October and last year.

Now I'm going to talk about, my opinions slightly, and where I see mental wellbeing, exercise, and the profession as a whole. So what can we do individually? Individually, we can make a collective change by doing the basics well.

I'm going to run through 5 points, individually in a minute, but here they are just, just so you know. So firstly, focus on your own well-being. Secondly, see what works for you.

Thirdly, set examples, 4th, habits, and 5th, talking. Now, these are my points. I, there's no reference for this, I'm afraid.

It's, just off the top of my head and a little bit of thinking here and there. But this is, sort of my message and what I think we can do individually as part of the profession. So, first things first, I'm a strong advocate for focusing on our own mental wellbeing.

Unfortunately, I'm a much better advocate for it than I am at doing it myself. And I'm sure a few people can attest to that. However, I also doubt I'm not alone in that sentiment.

As I've put on the side, it is much, much easier to comment from afar. So, but how often do you, do we actually focus on ourselves? I think it is crucial sometimes that we do take 5 minutes, also, or 45 minutes in this case, just to focus on our own practises, what we do well, what we wish we could do better, and perhaps what we can learn from those around us too.

Secondly, see what works for you. So I've rattled on about exercise and it's positive effects, for the last half an hour or so. But as I alluded to earlier, there are many different ways to focus on your wellbeing and do what's best for your own mental health.

Here's a, just a few of the, a few points off the top of my head. Obviously exercise, there are many, many different ways. It doesn't just have to be an exercise programme or a sports team.

Something as simple as a brisk walk with friends, is a great way to enjoy exercise. Secondly, mindfulness can be incredibly useful. And similarly to that is journaling.

Lots of people, enjoy journaling. I think the last two are slightly different. Again, time away from social media.

I think everyone appreciates it can be very, very compulsive. However, putting that phone away or turning off Facebook or whatever it may be, . Is very important and time away from phones.

I know it's very ironic because we're sat here at 7:40 on a Friday evening looking at a screen, but I think those are just a few points, to see perhaps what works best for you. Next, setting examples, and I think this point is really, really key, and it's not just about setting examples for one another, but I believe it's also about setting examples for ourselves. I believe that this, this point is applicable to everyone, and it's actually more of a passive process than you might realise.

You don't have to think you're setting an example to be setting an example. However, the obvious situations for setting examples are perhaps employees or older vet students or vet school staff, setting examples to those who look up to them. The slightly less obvious examples may come from closer relationships.

For example, you decide you want to do some exercise or give yourself some time to look after your own wellbeing, and I believe this may have a knock-on effect on those nearest and dearest to you. For example, other halves or university flatmates or perhaps your siblings, just as a few examples. Finally, I also believe we can set an example to ourselves.

And this slightly ties in with my next slide. However, if we manage to change our way of doing things, even for a short time, or a long time, I think in the future you can always reflect and look back on it and see that as an example set by yourself, for yourself, knowing that you can do something even if you don't think you can. Finally, I'd like to just mention, a blog I read the other day whilst we're on this side.

It was on the BVA website and it was from Robin Hargreaves, a past BVA president. And the, the blog was titled We Need to Talk About Lunch. And actually, it fitted very, very nicely into this slide about setting examples, and the idea that, that we need to make time for ourselves to have a lunch, even during a busy day.

And it really does have to come from setting examples, as mentors and role models who ultimately do have a great responsibility, in setting good examples rather than bad ones. So, I think, that's a really interesting read if you'd like to have a look at that too. Number 4, that's habits.

I wanted to add habits because unfortunately nothing comes without time and work. And I think it's incredibly important to consider that even though it's easy to say, putting into practise different activities in our life or altering our day so we can get, go out for a jog or take 10 minutes to ourselves isn't actually that easy. Additionally, at the same time, I'm, I really believe that, it stems from vet students to, I think, good practises and habits when you're a vet student, and harvesting those habits will hopefully lead to, more successful transfer of those habits as you enter the wider profe profession.

The last few points here, positive changes and second nature mentality. Just highlight the fact that it does take time and it does, does take effort, but generally, positive changes are great, and if things can become second nature, then you're, you're really on your way to, to success. Finally, talking, I'm a big advocate for talking.

So whether this be in person or due to COVID online or on FaceTime or whatever it is, I think it's very, very crucial that, and I think it's incredibly crucial that members of this profession are able to share their thoughts and views from the bottom to the top. And some of that comes tonight with a random 3 year talking at you from Nottingham. However, I found myself, being involved in many, many Zoom calls or, talks with the likes of James Russell and Mandisa Green, the BVA and our CVS president respectively.

And really I have no right to be up, talking with them, but I think it is really, really important to hear viewpoints and thoughts, from throughout the profession. So I think I really encourage people to continue talking and continue speaking their mind. And then also talking on a more personal level, 1 to 1 level with your friends, your loved ones, your family, and discuss, promote.

If you've done something great, I think it almost has a domino effect. And so that's why I think talking is really, really important. And finally asking as well, I don't think people should be afraid to ask what other, what works for other people, what works for mentors, or perhaps vet school staff, what they do do, what they don't do, what they wish they did.

So I think talking is crucial to. So I promise I'll leave you in peace in a bit and, leave you with the brilliant panel coming up, to talk about more of what my matters have to offer. However, before I go, I'd like to leave you, with a message, and it's only a single slide, so I promise I won't be keeping you for too long.

So my message, or I suppose messages, . Mental health and wellbeing are incredibly important. Obviously I have a great passion for the subject, but I hope I've conveyed that message to you this evening.

Secondly, it wouldn't be fair if I didn't mention exercise, and exercise is a great vector for positive physical and mental health. I know that that's slightly stating the obvious from what I've talked about this evening. But my dissertation was focused on exercise, and I was really, really pleased to see the positive effects it can have firsthand.

On the note of exercise, I know we focused on a programme, but there are many different ways people can exercise. And I hope, you take that away from the talk tea. Here's hoping that in a few months' time, all forms of exercise are possible again, and classes can be run and sports teams can play again, because that really will bolster mental wellbeing, I believe.

Finally, I want to leave you with three R's that I think encapsulates, my slides this evening. Reflect, reevaluate, and reach out. And, excuse the silly photo of, my dog Wommble at the end.

But hopefully, it just makes you smile on Friday evening. It certainly makes me smile, but I'm definitely biassed. So, reflect and re-evaluate, I think it's, it doesn't mean you have to make a huge change to your life.

Or, completely turn your world upside down. But I think it's important just to keep tabs on ourselves and just to make sure that we know where we are to reflect and evaluate, as we go along. And then finally, I believe reaching out is incredibly important, and really, really beneficial for one and all.

Here are some people that I owe a huge thank you to for all their support and help with everything, and a huge thanks to the Mind Matters team and the webinar vet team for giving me this opportunity to speak to you tonight. And finally, a big, big thank you to everyone who's tuned in and listened. I really, really appreciate you giving up your time this evening, and I hope it's been a little bit interesting, or you've enjoyed, what I've had to say.

There's some references for anyone who'd like to read them. And thank you for listening and feel free to ask any questions. Well I think we've certainly got some time for questions, Fergus, so thank you so much.

That was really, really interesting, . Of course we kind of sensed that exercise should be good for us, but it was great the way you were able to take the group of students and, you know, to see the, the very positive effects. I, I, I do see there was one who didn't look as if they enjoyed it, but you can't please all the people all the time, so.

And it's all horses for courses, using as many idioms as I can there. And do, does anybody have any questions? It'd be also interesting just to see where people are listening in from and perhaps, you know, whether you are a vet or a nurse or a vet nurse student or a veterinary student, just so we get an idea of who you are.

We got a, an anonymous attendee saying, this is interesting, my first job, work-life balance was atrocious, but I exercise twice a day with the other assistant vets, as we all walked our dogs in the morning together and would walk again in the evening once or twice a week. We all seemed to have fun. And I think, yeah, it can really help, can it?

What we, what are your thoughts on that, Fergus? Yeah, I think I think it's really, really interesting and I think that's . I think the fit guys would know a lot more about this, because, obviously, in practise, and, seeing the, seeing the effects firsthand, but I know that in their own practises, they do encourage that sort of group exercise and that, group togetherness.

And I think it, from what I hear and what I see on their Instagram and Facebook, it does seem like it, really does bolster camaraderie as well. So, I think it's great. It sounds, sounds like a great, suggestion.

Good, great. Anybody wanting to tell us where they're listening in from? So Katherine is in Aberdeenshire and she's a vet.

We've got quite a number of other people, so perhaps if you just tell us where you're listening in from and whether you're a vet or a, a nurse. I must admit I've, I'm in the middle of a detox at the moment. I, I've signed up for a programme and the first thing the guy said was remove all social media apps from your phone to free up time, and it's obviously been quite, you know, effective.

So, I can certainly recommend that as well. Hillary's listening in from Norfolk and is a vet. Gordon is a good, good friend, another dermatologist, listening in from Kalamazoo, which is, which is in Michigan and he's a vet.

I am, Anthony, I believe there were a couple of questions that I've just got up on my phone from the Hoover app. Oh great, yeah, well, if you want to read those out for us, Fergus. So the first one was, have practises tried to engage clients and pets to exercise together more.

Now, obviously as a as a vet student, I'm not in a position to answer that firsthand. However, I thought it was a very, very interesting concept of, engaging clients and pets to exercise more together. And I'm sure, those that are, interested in pet obesity as well, would find that very interesting.

So I thought I'd throw that out there. And then the second question, similar sort of line, similar sort of tack, but Mental and physical exercises can be promoted by practises, could emailing clients monthly suggestions be a good thing? So I'm really putting that to any, any vets out there and whether they'd adopt that as a practise policy perhaps, and perhaps talking about exercise more openly in practise, with each other and with clients.

But, obviously as a vets unit, I'll just leave those two there. Fantastic. We've also got, and I'm, I'm sorry because he's just Gladden and saying a proud supervisor listening in from Nottingham.

So you've got somebody checking up on you there, but I think she's, I think you've done a very good job, which I do as well. Catherine. Yes, that's what she say, yeah.

Is it, is it he or a she? Georgie, she, she supported me, with it all, so thank you very much. Ah, that's fantastic.

We've got Catherine saying thank, think there are many more clients with puppies out walking locally, because of course we've got our pandemic puppies, which we will be talking about tomorrow. In the ethics and welfare section tomorrow where we are talking about pandemic puppies, which we'll we'll wait and see what happens there, whether people stick with them once things move to normality. Sue is a Lancashire vet.

She's saying having a dog is a great way to meet people and get fresh air, along with the obligation to get her out each day. Feel lucky to have been able to have a dog coming into work. When needed due to my job, so yeah, I think that's definitely right, and just having a pet, even if you don't exercise it, I think is, has such a positive mental health effect as well, doesn't it so?

And Fergus obviously. No, that sounds great. Sounds great.

I'm, very much, I have to say, missing a dog in a university scenario. So, jealous reading those ones, but, very interesting ethical dilemmas as well that I'm sure, can weigh up the, puppies versus exercise tomorrow, perhaps. Yeah.

We've got another anonymous attendee, I exercise in the car park for hours daily due to COVID. It is miserable. There's no time for any positive exercise vet aged 56, but at least we're .

We're getting out and the fresh air and so on. Very interesting, and, fingers crossed with Boris, Boris's announcement on Monday, whoever that anonymous attendee is, that, perhaps group exercise or, practical exercise together will be something that you can do, not in not too long. And Hillary says this has been very well presented, thank you.

I like the idea of group exercise, wait for out of lockdown, so as you said, as we can come out of lockdown, that will be, that will be really good. If, if nobody else has any more comments or questions, I will just introduce Lisa. Lisa Quigley is going to introduce the Mind Matters Initiative, Sarah Brown Mental Health Research grants.

Lisa is responsible for the day to day running of the Royal College Mind Matters Initiative, which, as you all know, seeks to address mental health and wellbeing issues in the veterinary profession. She has got a background in mental health and previously worked at South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust, where she led on employment. Engagement and retention, working directly with individuals with mental health conditions, so, .

Looking forward to Lisa introducing and I will turn my camera off and if you could do the same Fergus, that'd be great. Thanks Lisa. Thanks, Anthony, and thanks so much Fergus, and that was a really fantastic presentation, and I'm not sure how I'm going to follow it, but I will do my best.

So this evening I'm going to talk just for a short while about the mental health research grants, that Mind Matters awards each year in memory of Sarah Brown. So Just to start, I wanted to talk a bit about Sarah. So Sarah was a vet, and an RCBS council member, and she was really passionate about mental health, and she spoke really quite openly and.

Honestly about her own experiences, with mental health. She worked incredibly hard to improve mental health support for the professions, and this is a really key part of her very successful election bid for our CVS council. And, it really saddens me.

So I never actually got the chance to meet Sarah. She died in, 2017, which was just a few months before I took up my post at the college. But I do, very regularly meet people who were lucky enough to have called Sarah a colleague or a friend.

And from speaking to them and to her family, it's just so clear and what a huge impact she had on the profession. And how hard she worked to make things better. And the incredible sense of loss that's, that's still there, so 3 years on now, for those who knew and loved her and for the profession as a whole.

So these grants are in Sarah's memory, and they're a way to, to honour her, the incredible work she did. And we are really grateful to her family. They've given us their blessing for this project, and their continued support for these grants has been just absolutely fantastic.

So, these research grants, they were launched in 2019, and, and they're a really integral part of our prevent work stream. So those of you who are familiar with my Matters, you might remember that we have three work streams, prevent, protect and support. Now the support workstream that is achieved through funding of external support services, so, Vet Life, ett Support Northern Ireland.

Protect, that's about equipping members of the profession with the Skills to thrive, in what can be a really tough profession. So, in that stream, we have things like our training programmes, the work we've done with the wet wellbeing, the vet Wellbeing Awards, not the wet Wellbeing Awards. That's something entirely different.

And the Sarah Brown grants, they fall under our first streams, so the prevent stream. And, and this includes the work we do around stigma, the awareness raising, and there's also a really heavy research focus. So, We really want our activities to be evidence-based, and we want to know what are the issues, how can we help?

What can we learn from outside the professions as well. And part of that is engaging with the existing research, and we run a mental health research symposium every 2 years, and that's to showcase the work of people from inside and outside the professions in this area. And another part of this is, encouraging and supporting researchers to look at these areas.

And in the last 5 years or so there's been a really huge increase in the amount of research related to veterinary wellbeing and mental health, which is, is just really great to see. So, our grant recipients, they are invited to share the research at our symposium, that's every 2 years, and, and that helps us to make sure that we're continuing to share knowledge and that's out there and that we can continue to learn from each other. We have made 3 grants so far, so 2 of those recipients are here today, and so I won't say too much about those, other than to say.

We are just totally delighted to have been able to fund these projects. They're so important. And we've got Kate Stephen.

Kate was our first ever recipient of this award, and she was looking at mental health and farm vets. And we're also hearing from the and Victoria from RBC and they were awarded a grant last year, and they're looking at the impact of racism on the veterinary community. And our third recipient, he wasn't able to be here today, that's Professor Neil Greenberg and his team at King's College London.

And their project, it's looking at something called moral injury in the veterinary profession. So those situations where these. And circumstances that might be outside your control.

So whether that's that's COVID restrictions or something else, you're forced to make difficult decisions and that are perhaps troubling to you, in terms of your own values. So those are the three grants that we've awarded so far. So just to go quickly through the process and the criteria, the research refund can be for any aspect of mental health and wellbeing.

We are not prescriptive about it. There's full details on our website and but to apply you just need to send in a research proposal. And we do ask that all applicants are affiliated in some way, with the university.

And if you're going to be conducting research. Human participants and obviously, ethical approval will need to be in place. And one thing I do want to make really, really clear, these grants are open to researchers at all stages of their career.

So if you're a student and you've just got this really good idea, but you've not ever really been involved in research before, or there's an aspect of mental health that you're really passionate about, please do apply. And it doesn't matter if you've not been published before. If you're just Starting out in research, please, we really want to hear from early stage researchers.

And on a final note, these are absolutely open to, to nurses and student vet nurses as well. One thing is we are really lacking good research about mental health and well-being in vet nursing. And so on a personal note, sort of from the, the judging panel, I would just really love to see some proposals for studies that might address that gap.

So, applications for 2021, they're now open. There's loads more details on our website or you are welcome to email me with any queries. But our CVS Knowledge, that's our, our partner charity, they've been really generous with their time, and they're offering 1 to 1 support sessions for anyone that could do with just a little bit of support around honing their proposal.

So if you've got a really good. Idea, but you're just not sure how to present it in, in a proposal, you've not done it before, you just want to run a few things by someone. It's a really good opportunity.

I really urge you to take advantage of it. So if you want to book a session for one of those, just drop me an email, I'll get that set up for you. The closing date is Friday, 31st of April, I'm really looking forward to to getting some proposals coming in.

So I'm about to hand over, to some of our former recipients of these grants, and they'll be able to tell you about their research and the really amazing things they'll be working on. And just a final thing from me, so, this is our website address. Mind Matters has got loads going on this year.

We've just got a new director coming in who's amazing, and so please do . Look at our website and see what we've got going on, and I'm also really pleased to hear from anyone who's got any ideas or the things that they think we should be working on or anything they want to share with us. And I'll stick around at the end for some questions.

Thank you. Hello. My name is Kate Steven, and I'm here to tell you a little bit about the project we undertook recently, which was funded by the Sarah Brown Mental Health Research Grant.

Our project focused on farm vets and farm animal practise and how vets coped with some of the most challenging aspects of the job and they looked at what elements of these ways of coping could be translated into tools that might be useful for other vets to help them cope. So I'm going to talk to you a little bit about the application process and a wee bit about the implementation of the project, and I'll share with you very brief results and then mention at the end what might happen in the future. So the application process was fairly straightforward and But, despite that, I think it's really good to approach even small projects to large projects with the similar way of thinking.

So we used a kind of project management approach and So we applied for the grant in the same kind of structure that we would think about whether it was 200,000 or 2 million. It's just the detail was slightly different, but it was the same kind of approach to the project. We also considered the source of the funding and the aims of the funder.

And it was quite a personal, type of a grant, you know, named after Sarah Brown. And so we really felt that it was important to focus on something that resonated with the aims of the funder in terms of improving mental health of vets and reducing suicide. So our project didn't directly relate to suicide prevention.

But we were looking at ways of helping vets to cope with their experiences and their jobs and the demands of their jobs and by improving ability to cope and mechanisms to manage low mood and and to a Be more positive about addressing mental health issues. We hoped that that might be useful in improving mental health of farm vets and potentially avoiding a suicide ideation and in deaths by suicide in future. So we wanted to address that problem of poor mental health in veterinary practise and our experience was relating to farm vets and because of our previous work, we were aware of this, some of the issues faced by vets and so The grant was just an opportunity for us to take things a step forward and to do something about a problem that we had already recognised.

And I think I would really encourage others to do to use the grant, if you know of issues that face the profession and that a small research project might be able to help illuminate. What that problem is and find some solutions, then that would be a really positive thing for more and more people to apply and to contribute. So the implementation side of it were more generally, I mean it was a small grant 20,000 pounds and so and there's a slight gap between what I hope to achieve with the project and being realistic about what was possible within the funding that was available and the time constraints.

And so I had to work on focusing on And what we could really achieve in that time. But seeing that, and our team benefited very much from a lot of goodwill, and I think every team member contributed over and above what was what they were funded to do, and there was a lot of voluntary effort included. And then we also benefited from a lot of goodwill and advice and contributions more widely, more widely within SRUC.

There was a lot of expertise and experience that helped inform the project and guided us. But as well as that, we had a lot of encouragement and support and input more widely from the profession, which was very much appreciated. I guess there was a gap also between the aspiration and being realistic about what the project could achieve in a wider sense.

I think and farm veterinary practise hasn't been looked at that carefully in terms of mental health. And so there was a real sense that this was an opportunity to make some improvements, change things and and And it was difficult to actually manage sometimes expectations and being be realistic about what could be achieved within the project. On a practical level, and it was interesting to have farm vets as participants of a research project.

And we were using telephone interviews to contact vets around the UK and It sounds simple, but it was actually quite challenging to get hold of them. And sometimes they were on call and at the time that they thought they might be able to have a conversation and then they were then called out. And so there was a lot of time that they spent on the road and on a farm that maybe was longer than they thought.

And so they wouldn't get back to their office or get back into an internet or telephone signal. And so, you know, there was a few interviews conducted in cars parked in laybys in during lunch hours or on route back after a farm visit. That was quite difficult for us as a research team to coordinate with that kind of A the time constraints and, and, and all the flexibility that was needed.

We really tried to be flexible, and, but that was quite a challenge for us to do that. And so, we ended up getting about 32ish interviews, but there was probably at least over 80 expressions of interest in participating. And, and as well as that we really try to be sensitive to avoid a pursuing vets when they were having very busy times, such as a lambing or doing exams and things like that.

So we really tried to think about vets themselves as a centre to the whole thing and to fit around their needs as much as possible. And so that approach was a kind of throughout the project where this our results were really presenting for the vets themselves have said. And so we we we drew from the interviews and had a workshop to decide what to focus on and then prepared the materials that are now available on how farm vets cope.co.uk.

So one of the main The main bits of content of that website are quotes from vets. And it really reports what vets have said, and we've got some that are audio recordings and some that are written. So the older recordings, we've just got a handful of them, and some, some of them are positive stories or funny stories about what vets have experienced and practise that are a wee bit entertaining, and other times it's vets talking about what went wrong for them and how they how they coped with that.

And this element of the project was very well received, and I think there is a demand for more of this kind of content, which would be for vets can listen and hear the experiences described by other vets that they can relate to. And from the written quotes, we've split them up into longer quotes, medium length of quotes and short reads, and that was really so that if somebody's got a phone with them and an internet connection and only 5 minutes, they could, you know, flick through some some short reads if they're not in the mood to read anything at length. And so, but if they do have more time and they really want to get into a subject more, they can click on the longer leads.

And we we categorised them fairly loosely into what the quotes were about. And this is an example of a vet explaining what they did when something went wrong for them, and the advice they would give to other vets, should something go wrong. So it was like, speak about it to someone more senior, explain what's happened.

Don't try to hide it. And then they can tell you if it's, well, I was going to die anyway. That wasn't your fault.

And so you can see from these quotes that and they're very much about experience of livestock vets. This is not a genetic bit of advice that somebody would give to manage low mood or to a like CBT or anything like that. This is very, very specific to a veterinary practise, and we had a very light touch with it editing.

We really just presented what the vet said. The other thing we, prepared was a mockup of what a map of vets on call would look like. There was a real sense of isolation by A vets when they're especially anti-social or out of office hours and they're driving around the countryside on way to a farm or on the way back from a farm.

And, you know, things are difficult, it's a bad calving or a just being alone for that length of time at nighttime, you know, these were quite difficult times for some of the vets. And so, They really sometimes felt that they were very alone, and it was kind of bizarre that they should be driving at 2 o'clock in the morning to some remote farm. And because none of their friends lived that kind of lifestyle.

And so knowing that they were not alone and that there were other people who were actually experiencing the same kind of lifestyle, making the same choices and facing the same challenges. It was something that was thought to be useful. And so this isn't a real the figures are a mock up, but it's the kind of thing that could be developed where if vets gave permission to be To be for their location to be known through an app, they could, it could produce a map of this nature, and then they could say, all right, you know, in the southwest of England, there's another 20 odd people who are on call right now.

They're all active and working and, you know, there's there's potential for It's to connect with each other so that instead of phoning somebody from their own office or practise who might be asleep and they don't want to disturb them, they could actually try and catch somebody else who was awake and on call at 3:30 in the morning for a chat or to discuss something. The other element of what was produced was around distraction and management of low mood, and what vets talked about really, we talked quite a lot about that time in a car between visits, and we You know, but if something, if they were dreading going to a farm because they just didn't know what they were going to face or where they were really quite upset about how a consultation had gone on a farm and the outcome was not what they had hoped. And, you know, they're dealing with death and disease and difficult farmers, and these things can weigh heavily, especially when you're by yourself and your thoughts are going round and round.

Questioning yourself and your own abilities. And so distraction was thought to be really useful. And so a lot of vets talked about how they would listen to a podcast and the choice of podcast was very personal.

It could be about other vets, or it could be an audiobook and or just something interesting, a discussion. Some vets wanted to hear vets like themselves talk about their practise and some of the challenges are interesting cases they might have encountered. But as others wanted to escape to something completely different and to be distracted to have thoughts that were completely not related to their their job.

And it was similar with music. A lot of people talked about listening to music and how that helped them to manage their mood, whether they would put on some music that they would find great to sing along to or just cheer cheer them up, or Or or just for the forever was their favourite music that they find helpful to listen to. So we produced a couple of, you know, template, a playlists as examples of what the vets talked about.

The other thing a vets talked about was how difficult it was sometimes to get to sleep when they came home, you know, after a bit of adrenaline. And they when we're going home and thinking over again and again what had happened, especially if things had gone wrong. And so being able to switch off and turn off and relax, it was something that people talked about quite a lot.

And so one of the playlists we've got there is music that you could might be helpful to get to sleep with. So the The website, how farm vets Cope has been produced with some of these elements on it, and we really are very, very grateful to all the vets who contributed their ideas and their thoughts and and talked about their experiences and and how these experiences have now been translated into quotes from vets. So we're very, very grateful for that contribution, which has been absolutely critical and central to the project.

And we're thinking about what, what's next, and we have a lot of data that That's talked quite a lot about their experiences, both about the brilliant things about their jobs and what they find most enjoyable and satisfying, but also some of the structural problems that they found that really Made it difficult for them to cope, and other times, how they really struggle to cope at various different points in their career and how they felt either trapped or a not good enough, or that they weren't managing to cope with the type of physical challenges and the sometimes repetitive workload. And so I think it would be interesting to think about if these, if this data, it could be useful and might be helpful to the profession. We do hope to add some further material to the website, and it's just within the time frame.

There's still some material that we would like to add, and we're looking for an opportunity to do that. It would be good to Publish some of the findings, and there is a a real potential, I think, to develop farmer friendly interventions for farm vet friendly interventions, . Inspired by what vets have told us and just bringing the kind of basic website web-based materials, bringing that on to a next level where it could be an app that the individual vets could personalise and then they would have access to the data on their phone, even if they were out with a signal.

But again, that's one of the restrictions about a small pot of funding is that this is additional to what we were able to do in the time frame. And so we, we, we just need a bit more time and a bit more voluntary effort in order to develop on to the next stage. So thank you very much for listening to this webinar, a segment.

I hope you find it interesting, and I'm very happy to share more of our experiences will be presenting at the Mind Matters initiative symposium in November. And so you can hear a lot more detail about the methods we used and a bit more detail about the findings. But in the meantime, and I hope you can have a wee look at the website and it'd be very interesting to hear what you think.

So thank you very much. If you do have any questions, please email me and get in touch and I can very delighted to talk a little bit more and answer any questions. Thank you very much.

So we have Thee and Victoria from the RVC coming up next and they were one of our amazing grant recipients for this year. I'm not going to tell you too much about their project, but it's just absolutely fantastic and something that we're really delighted to be to be involved with. So I'll hand over to those two now.

OK KOT the. Perfect, thank you. So, both Victoria and I are, are really, happy and proud to, have received a Sarah Brown mental health grant for our survey, which is looking at experiences of racism and its impact on mental well-being in black, Asian, and minority ethnic people working or studying in the veterinary sector.

So, we're going to be doing a bit of a double act, so, my plan is to start off just talking about diversity in general and racism, in the veterinary sector, and what we know, and, and, and talk a little bit about the links of racism and mental health in the veterinary profession. Victoria's then gonna take over and talk a little bit about our journey of how the. The idea for this survey came along, and how we, put the team together, before she then explains how, we went about applying for the grant and receiving the grant.

And then I'm going to end a little bit about the survey itself, and what our future plans are. So I'll just start by introducing ourselves because you might not be familiar with. So I'm Victoria Crossley, and I graduated as a vet from the University of Edinburgh in 2009.

My background as a small animal vet, but I moved into academia about 8 years ago, first as feline fellow at the University of Bristol. And then I did a PhD investigating feline hyperthyroidism at the RVC. And since finishing that, I've been working at the RVC and Research Impact, which is to do with translating academic research into the real world, where it can make a difference, alongside teaching and tutoring on the BET Med course.

So I'm Thebe, and I qualified with Victoria, Edinburgh. I went into farm animal practise, so I was in clinical practise for a number of years before then moving into pharmaceuticals, and then I was a senior lecturer at the Royal Agricultural University for a few years, but now I'm a dairy technical specialist, with an American animal health company. So another colleague of mine, and somebody else we qualified with, ISA, and I created the, founded the British Me Ethnicity and Diversity Society in 2016.

The aim of the society was to promote, support, educate, and celebrate on race and ethnicity in the veterinary sector. So what we did is we created a safe space, a closed Facebook group where people could talk for, ethnic minorities and allies. We also created an external Facebook group to share stories and education.

We created a website, and what we do is we, do talks, we try and do write articles, and support organisations, within the sector to help try and improve diversity and inclusion. So I just want to go on to a little bit about the veterinary profession and where we stand at the moment. So if we think about the UK population, we're quite lucky that we live in such a diverse country.

So 16.5%, which was, is ethnic minorities in the UK, of which 40% in, in London, the number is about 40%. So that's the 16.5%, probably the size of Wales and Scotland put together.

So it's quite a big population and it's a fast growing population. The number of children in the UK, 33% identify as BME and 29% are full-time undergraduates entering higher education are BME as well. So again, there are a lot of young people, of, from a minority ethnic background.

Now, in a country with such a big ethnic minority population, the veterinary profession is one of the least ethnically diverse in the UK. Only 3.5% of UK vets are from an ethnic minority background, and only 2% of vet nurses are BME.

So again, we don't really reflect the country that we, we live in. And finally, in 2015, under 6% of students studying veterinary medicine were people of colour. So what I can see from previously is we don't have many people entering the profession from a minority background, so there are barriers to entering the profession.

In 2019, the British Veterinary Association did the first discrimination survey in, in, in our sector, and they found that 26% of BME respondents had experienced discrimination in the previous 12 months, and over half of these stated that the incidents had not been dealt with satisfactorily. Students were less likely to report incidents of discrimination than qualified vets, with, with 1 in 5 incidents as experienced or witnessed by students reported. And, you know, as someone coming from a BME background, I can fully, you know, understand that, and, and it's something that I, I witnessed and I experienced myself.

Surprisingly, and worryingly, there's a huge lack of awareness of the problem in vets. Only 55% of vets, over, over, you know, 55% of vets were not very concerned about diversity, and 44% said they were not concerned about discrimination. Some veterinary students and recent grads appeared to have had similarly poor awareness, with 62% reported little need to recruit students from a more diverse background.

So with racism, there is the link with mental health. It has been reported there are high levels of anxiety and depression that are known to affect UK veterinarians. And there are multiple studies to show the clear evidence of a strong association between experiences of racism and negative mental health and well-being.

Longitudinal studies have also shown harm from microaggressions, and microaggressions are sometimes also termed as everyday racism. And these would include things like so-called banter, or language or certain words that are used that are discriminatory. And again, you know, it, because it's of the regularity of it, it impacts people often, so it can be even more emotionally and mentally taxing than the extreme racism that we probably read about or see on TV.

The big problem with the about racism in the veterinary profession is very little formal research investigating it. So They've been called to investigate racism for quite a while, so BEs formed in 2016, and previous to that, you know, I, we, I and others had been trying to individually raise the issue among the different bodies. So when, when BEDs formed, it was more of a collective and hopefully a stronger voice.

And so between 2016 and 2019, we've been calling on the different associations and institutions to really make this a matter to, to, to work on. The veterinary record, interviewed three, vets of colour, to talk about racism, and that was the first time that it had been written up in, in a journal, and since then there have been many articles and there have been many talks, and I think in the last couple of years it's really been highlighted, the inequalities. So with Brexit, followed by, COVID, and then, the, when the death of Floyd George and Black Lives Matter.

This has really put this, on the agenda, and I think it's really highlighted that we need to be doing something about it. So, as mentioned from my background, I've mainly been involved with researching problems that affect cats. So I thought I would explain how I came to be involved with this project.

So one of my current roles is as an academic tutor to students at the RVC and for me, this stimulus for the project came from being copied into an email that one of my tutors sent to the college around the time of all the activities of Black Lives Matter last July. And in this email, the student described multiple incidents of racism that she had experienced, both from students in college and from vets whilst on EMS placement. She included descriptions of the impact that these incidents had had on her mental wellbeing and also suggested practical things that she thought might help in terms of being able to help address the issues that she described.

And I was both shocked and horrified by the content, and reading her account essentially opened my eyes quite a lot as to just how important this issue is and how we need to do something about it. And a quote, which I have her permission to share, which particularly resonated, was every time a student made a racist comment to me, I'd just brush it off or laugh it off. And by not calling it up straight away, I made them think that it was OK to do it to someone else.

And I dread to think that because of that, someone could have lost their life. I've had to sit back and think whether I too facilitated the problem. Despite having done diversity and inclusion training that's mandatory for all staff, I also felt really out of my depth with this issue, both in terms of how best to support the students on a personal level.

And I also wanted to find out what sort of things could be done on a wider level to be able to improve things. So Phoebe and I were in the same year at Edinburgh, and although we haven't been in contact since then, I'd heard of Beds. So I reached out to him for some advice.

And he told me that the sort of things that the student had described were similar to things that he himself had experienced, and also that he had had reports of similar things from students from all the other vet schools through his dealings with Beds. We talked about a course that he was designing for delivery in vet schools and how the research to date around experiences of racism in the UK veterinary sector is extremely limited. And I floated the idea of us doing some research together on the basis that we could pull together a group of researchers with the appropriate skills to be able to address the problem.

And so this is how our project began. I then contacted Jackie Cardwell at the RVC who I knew had done some excellent research investigating mental health and veterinary students, and with her, PhD student, Alisa Lewis, who's a psychologist and lecturer at London South Bank University. And serendipitously, she'd actually already been in discussions with Elisa and Christine Theona McKeva, who chairs the Equality and Diversity Commission committee at the RVC.

And from further discussion, I given the lack of data on the topic and inspired by the type of information that could be gained from accounts such as the one given in the student's email. We decided that an in-depth qualitative investigation would be the best way to invoke approach in researching experiences of everyday racism and their impact on mental health, in black, Asian and ethnic minority people who work in the veterinary sector. So we therefore needed an experienced qualitative data analyst who would be able to effectively analyse this data, which led us to Naomi King, who's another psychologist and postdoctoral researcher at Oxford Brookes University, and who had previously worked on analysing the experience of BME students in higher education.

To further expand the diversity of the project team, which is something that's really important for the nature of the data ana analysis, we were joined by Namesha Patel, who's a veterinary nurse who had worked at Bristol Vet School and been involved in diversity initiatives as part of the VN Futures report. And also Arif Batch, who's an RBC student who's working on a related topic as part of an undergraduate research project. And as such, between us, we have experience in conducting and publishing qualitative research, investigating mental health and well-being of students, students, experiences, of BME students in higher education.

Both BME and non-BME members with experience of work and study across veterinary schools, multiple veterinary schools from both vet, non-vet, vet nurse, students and academic perspectives. We've also got experience of employment both in Small and large animal veterinary practise, working in veterinary industry, experience teaching students, qualified vets and nurses, experience promoting an increasing ethnicity and diversity and sort of wider engagement of the veterinary profession on these matters through the experience in Beds. And also his work in creating educational resources to help increase the issues within the veterinary sector, and also my own experience in maximising research impact.

So this is our team here at our project meeting last week. And I just want to take this opportunity to thank and acknowledge our whole team, who are a total joy to work with and without whom this project would not be possible. So the aim of our project is to understand experiences of racism and its effects on mental well-being in black, Asian and minority ethnic people working and studying in the UK veterinary sector, with the main objectives of describing individuals' experiences of racism, while working and studying and the impact that these experiences have had on their mental wellbeing and job satisfaction.

We also wanted to capture what individuals think could or should be done to tackle racism within the sector. And we hope to use this information to highlight key issues for consideration in the design of appropriate interventions. We decided that we would do this by using an online anonymous survey targeted at all black, Asian minority ethnic people working or studying in the veterinary sector in the UK.

So not just vets and veterinary nurses. And following on from our aims and objectives, our survey asks participants to write detailed account of any instance of racism that they've experienced while working or studying in the profession. The impact of these experiences on their mental well-being and also any any any information that they would like to volunteer as to what they think could or should be done to help tackle the problem.

We also want to give participants the option to volunteer for a follow-up interview, which would enable us to further investigate a small number of participants' experiences in more detail. So we plan to analyse our data using thematic analysis, and as such, the more detail that participants are actually happy to provide in their written accounts, including on the survey, the better. So, this isn't really a sort of typical tick box survey.

It's really, we really are interested in hearing individuals, accounts in detail. So we wanted to apply for the Sarah Brown grant for a number of reasons. The and I were both really deeply saddened to hear about the news about Sarah Brown several years ago.

She studies at Edinburgh at a similar time to us, although we didn't know her. But I think it really brought the problems of mental health in the profession incredibly close to home on a personal level, and, highlighted the need for research into mental health issues that affect people working in the veterinary sector. We felt that our research really fit the great focus of Grant quite well, and that our research has the capacity to really contribute on a practical level to the profession.

I also like the fact that it encourages applications from early career researchers, as it was the first externally funded research grant application that are written. And I found the website really helpful in the process, and they suggest looking at the guidance on the Economic and Social Research Council websites, and I also found that really helpful. So we, we worked together and we came, first of all, we wanted to make a survey that would be memorable, easy, and catchy as well.

So we've, we thought about we all worked together and called it the Race Together veterinary survey. And so we came up with this logo, and the next thing is we decided that we were gonna run it for two months, based on, the, the people on the team who had more, experience with running, research like this. We put it on SurveyMonkey, so there was easy accessibility.

And the next thing was how we were going to disseminate the survey. So, we, we, we, we broke it down into 4 groups, and the plan was, was to write down everybody we wanted to work with, so that, and on the, a few days before we would send out, the information about the survey so that they could share it on, on the opening day. So we, we, we, we, with the veterinary organisations, for example, the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons, BVA.

The British Cattle Veterinary Association, SIs, AVS, and others, we, we contacted them and we sent it, we sent the survey to them, along with the, with the survey, we also sent them, some emails if they wanted to disseminate within their organisations, and we also sent out a press release as well, in case they wanted to produce that, and, and a copy of the logo. With the veterinary schools, we sent the same things to all the heads of the veterinary schools and to all their DNI committees as well. And for the nursing colleges, the BVNA were were kind enough to do that and send it out to all the veterinary nursing colleges as well, .

So, we did that, with industry, we were keen to, you know, cos we're trying to get, get the, the responses from the whole industry. So, people like veterinary recruitment companies and such like we, we, we sent out the survey too. And the media were very important as well.

So we used veterinary social media, so veterinary voices and veterinary slagoer diversify were, were important. But we also did a couple of, larger media things, so we did a short interview for BBC Radio 4. Who were running a week about vets, and, and part of that was, was talking about our survey.

The Horse and hound wrote a piece about our survey and Eastern Eye, which is the largest Asian paper in this, in the UK, and they wrote a piece about our, our survey as well, so that, that was quite successful. But we are, but the survey still got a few more weeks to run. So What we have to do is we have to keep repeating for people to sort of complete the survey.

So, and also, during this time, we're collating the results during the, during the survey and starting to analyse them early so that by the time we get to the end, we can get on to disseminate, writing up, writing up their results, sooner. So it's important, you know, getting the results and, and, and doing the survey is important, but I think we're really passionate about making this report and this survey, valuable for the profession and for the sector. So we want to produce a usable report that organisations can take home and read and hopefully use it for making their own organisations more inclusive.

And also other sectors as well, outside of the veterinary sector. So again, there's a lot of learnings that can be, can cross, different sectors. We really want to, we will work to producing a peer-reviewed publication, just so that we can show that our methodology is, is, is rigorous, but also if any researchers in the future want to add to our research or repeat the research, then there's a, a resource for them to refer to.

Presenting at the RCVS Mind Matters symposium, in 2021, for this year is gonna be important to help disseminate our findings and hopefully. We can share some of the results of, of our dissemination work. And again, I don't think it should really stop at that point, but, it's something that we need to work on, and really for the profession, if we want to learn about inclusive and inclusivity, talking further and disseminating our results and breaking it down is gonna be important.

So from Victoria and I thank you for listening, thank you for inviting us. Our emails are at the bottom so if you need any more information or you wanna ask us any questions then please contact us that way, or we're happy to take questions now. Thank you very much, both of you.

That was . Yeah, I'd like to say fantastic, but of course it's just so sad to realise that that kind of still happens, although. Clearly we see institutional racism, you know, at the very top level.

So it saddens me in a sense that we need to talk about this, but it's obviously really essential. So I don't know if anybody does have any questions, if anybody has any comments. Let me just see if anything comes through.

Can you hear me OK, both of you? Yes, we can. OK, great, great.

Just trying to also get perhaps if we get the video on and we can We can come on on on video as well. Great. Let me just see if we've got any questions coming through.

Let's see. Very happy also to push this out. So if you let us know the SurveyMonkey address, we'll see if we can get some more replies.

I find it hard to believe that people In university could give that lady a bad time and you know, as almost she was blaming herself to some degree and that she should never have to blame herself for something like that, so. It was when, you know, we, after when, when Black Lives Matters was at its height and I think it . A lot of people started to reflect and you know, the number of phone calls and students I talked to and it, it was and it was all the universities and it was a whole different, different year groups of students, but I think it's it really did make put things in perspective and things that people let go before actually it showed them that they didn't need to should't but it also highlighted the the.

Lack of reporting mechanisms maybe, so again it's, it helps sort of show some of the barriers why people weren't able to speak up, or, or things like that. And I think universe, maybe sometimes people don't think it will be taken seriously if they go to the university and so on. It's .

It is very, very sad and we think we're making progress, but of course it's not always . That obvious is it or you know, we're, we're clearly not making the progress that we. We would want to .

Yeah, I think people are, there's no comments coming out there. I think people are probably shocked as I am that this is. You know, still a problem really in in the sense of utter.

University level, although I do remember, I think, unfortunately the Brexit debate has probably uncovered some of that sort of, Hidden racism that suddenly it seems as if it's OK if you're not . White and British, it's, it seems OK to have a go. I know I've spoken to a few university people, you know, post Brexit where people who were not English, were made to feel unwelcome, you know, post-Brexit events, so I think maybe it is something that is, is turning.

We obviously have a more right wing government in place as well, which often will. Accentuate that, won't it? So, we, we have got a comment here, a couple of comments.

Ruth saying great session needs airing and talking about admitting this still happens so that we can address it. So thanks for that, Ruth. People have had to, I think, bring, get their thoughts together on this.

Maria saying I think ideally we should all be educated since very early times as a subject in school. And mental health management. I always think the golden rule is, you know, which is in probably most religions, do unto others as you would have done to yourself would probably solve a lot of this as well, wouldn't it, that if you don't, if you wouldn't like to be talked to like that, then you probably shouldn't talk to others.

I think, I think a big thing that came out of it for me was, Reading this email was so powerful in the, because it was, it was sort of compiled list of of all these different things. And as, as a tutor, it made also, I mean, I mean, I was completely unaware of this, this sort of thing. And again, it just made me think about my own naivety and how I needed to learn more about the topic.

And, it also made me reflect on what would I have done if My my TT had come to me and actually told me about one of these things. And just as an isolated incident. And, I mean, I, I, I just made me feel like, would I have sort of said in some way minimised it in terms of thinking, you know, being really sorry for what she's experienced.

But think, oh, I'm sure they didn't mean that if it was just an off the cuff comment or and it really made me think, oh my goodness, if, if that happened, then I would have been part of that, you know, not sort of minutes say minimising it, and, you know, there's somebody trying to report something that's really happened is really important. And actually, I wouldn't even have. Realised I was maybe doing something that wouldn't have been right.

And so, I think that one of the reasons we wanted to approach this project in this way is that, being able to get producer publication where people can actually read about this collective, issues that are going on, actually, maybe it'll have that sort of same effect that it had on me and really make you reflect on on things, because everyone likes to think they're doing the right thing and it's helping. But actually, It made me realise I didn't really have a clue. And this is such a journey for me.

And, you know, it's, it's, it's great I think to to be involved in it. Yeah, I think. You know, the people who obviously have also made those comments probably think it's a jokey thing and it's meant as a bit of banter and, you know, I always have not read the the letter, but clearly, you know, there is an agenda, and that's education, it's culture, it's, it, it goes back.

Not only to them, but probably to their parents and beyond, you know, to actually change your behaviour from what your parents were like is, can be very difficult, can't it? So it's ingrained in society, it's institutionalised racism. That's it's systemic, and that's, that's the, that's what upholds it.

It's a systemic nature of it that ups it and makes it OK, and, and. You know, individuals have to change as well, but also the system has to change and, and it's, it's breaking that down, but you know, that's a, it's taken hundreds of years to build that system. It's not gonna take, it's gonna take hundreds of years to, well, we hope it's not going to take hundreds of years, but it's gonna take a while to break that system, but again, we need to do, we try to change the the ways and like I said, you know, the thing is, the younger generation, 33% of children.

Our BME and they're all going to be wanting to be applying for jobs and and and and if the veterinary profession is, is looking to have a more diverse workforce and the vet schools are actively looking to diversify their student pool, then our profession has got to be, has got to change and, and, and, and be inclusive to be welcoming to people because they're going to leave it. Well, that's it exactly. And then, and what is, and then you're gonna have to speak, and so in a way we need to start.

Building this culture of acceptance and inclusivity now because the change is coming. It doesn't matter if we don't want it or want it, it's coming, so. And I, I think, you know, as a white man, you know, I have a friend who's Caribbean who would get, you know, this was going back a while now, but would get racially abused outside the practise which was actually very near to where I was brought up in Liverpool.

You know, and some people would then, when they see how he would react, would say, well, a bit of a chip on the shoulder, but actually that's really unhelpful language, you know, we, we, . We have to do a lot in this area and I think it's, it's fantastic that the two of you and, and, and others are obviously coming together to, to put this research together, so I'll, I'll look forward to seeing how it develops, but . It's sad to see that it's a topic that we almost have to discuss unfortunately.

Catherine's saying thought provoking presentations, I think for, you know, also for Fergus as well. Zero tolerance to racism, I absolutely agree, Catherine. I don't know if Lisa wants to come in and make any, any comments.

I'm conscious we're getting close to 9 o'clock finish. Just, thank you very much for the session, and I think thank you very much for the very important work that you're both doing. Yeah, and just one quick thing to add is I guess the our CVS diversity and inclusion Group, and Steve has been sort of instrumental in helping us pull together our our statement.

That was released, I think last week. So that's available on, our, our CBS website, and I would, encourage people to, to go and have a look at that, and see kind of the steps that that the college is taking, to really try and, improve things, and we have got a really long way to go, but I. I think it's it's a start and it's really good that these these conversations are happening now.

And just absolutely delighted to be be supporting, this, this project because it's it's fantastic and it's so needed. And we're so grateful to obviously have received the grant. I mean, you know, it's it's just absolutely brilliant and with with so so grateful for the opportunity.

So thank you very much. Brilliant, thank you so much, Lisa. You know, I, I enjoy these sessions every year, we, we cover all sorts of different areas over the past 4 or 5 years, but this has been, .

It's one of those which, as I say, I just wish we weren't having to have, but it's really important that we start to, to make real progress on this and and make it a profession that is open to all. So thank you so much for the session. We will be starting bright and early tomorrow, 8 o'clock, some interesting, sessions on ethics and welfare, so we're talking about the pandemic puppy.

Which could become a thing in the next year or so. If obviously you haven't already got your ticket and you'd still like to get one, I think that you probably will have an email that is giving you that opportunity. And of course there's over 100 hours, and you have up to 12 months to consume the content, the RCBS require us to do 35 hours, but we should want to do that and maybe even more because, The more we do, the better vets we become and the.

Better the animals get looked after. So Pam's put the full schedule in there before we close it. If any of you want to have a little nose through, feel free.

Obviously we've been going all week, but the the programme can be watched at your leisure over the next 12 months. I just like to thank, Our CVS mind matters for making this possible and I wish you all a good morning, afternoon, evening, wherever you are listening from. Take care and thank you so much both of you.

That was excellent. Thank you, bye bye. Thanks, bye bye.