22 Mar TB Testing Personnel
We probably don’t need to tell you that veterinary manpower for farm work is under severe strain and many practices are really struggling to ensure that they continue to access the manpower needed to do their TB tests, especially if anyone gets a Track & Trace ‘ping’! The policy change to six-monthly testing is set to increase workload substantially in the High-Risk Areas (HRA) and this challenge may be compounded for affected practices because farmers have been offered a one-off chance to shift their planned test date by a few weeks to a time of year that suits them better.
Farmers are only allowed to make any change to their planned test date if they can assure the Authority that they have first discussed their wishes with their preferred vet practice. APHA have promised to let us know whenever a change has been made and we will endeavour to share that information with you as early as possible to help you with your test planning. They will provide a report regarding the request for change even if the test schedule has not yet been allocated to your practice.
One or two practices in the HRA have suggested that it’s worth spending a little time checking out what the change to a six-monthly default is likely to mean to your own practice workload. Colleagues have used the reports available within TOM to look at the volume of work completed in the last six months of 2020 or 2019 and then added that number to the number of cattle tested throughout the year as a whole. Clearly this approach is a ‘worst-case-scenario’ and takes no account of any farms that are eligible to remain on annual testing, but it could perhaps help your teams plan in advance for the additional workload that might be on its way.
APHA’s own forecasts show considerable variation in workload uplift from county to county. This is presumably because areas where larger units are already on regular short-interval testing would perhaps be less seriously affected on a cattle-tested basis. However, you may still find that the numbers of tests will rise considerably as the smaller herds without exemptions move from twelve-monthly to twice yearly testing intervals.