BSAVA Congress

British Small Animal Veterinary Association photo

The final BSAVA Congress was held in March.

One of the world's oldest and largest conferences for veterinary professionals has met its end, sunk by years of financial losses that it attributes to rising competition from other events and changes in the way practitioners access continuing education.

The British Small Animal Veterinary Association announced this month that it is permanently ending its annual meeting, known as BSAVA Congress, in the United Kingdom, 67 years after the first event was held at the Shaftesbury Hotel in London.

That first conference, held in 1958, was attended by 245 veterinarians. The increasingly popular event was later moved to Birmingham, eventually growing to accommodate upward of 7,000 visitors in its heyday a decade or so ago. A move to Manchester in 2022 appears to have done little to arrest a recent decline in its popularity. Visitor numbers at this year's conference in March totaled 3,163 — less than half of the just over 7,000 who came in 2012. (For context, the world's largest veterinary conference is the Veterinary Meeting & Expo, or VMX, which attracted more than 30,000 visitors this year in Orlando, Florida.)

The BSAVA has been making up for a budget deficit on the congress for a "number" of years, Bernard Frost, its head of membership and marketing, told the VIN News Service in an email last week. "This was done with a view to work towards a more sustainable financial situation in order that the association could continue to deliver this much-loved event," Frost wrote. "Despite the investment, the indicators — delegate and exhibitors' behaviour and buying decisions — were not providing the required confidence that this was a viable outcome."

The BSAVA, he added, decided it would better serve its members by investing in other things. He didn't elaborate on what those might be. "You'll just have to wait and see," Frost said. "We have some plans, but at this stage it would be inappropriate for me to disclose what these are."

Frost said the event was hurt by the Covid-19 pandemic, which affected conferences everywhere and forced veterinary professionals to increasingly access continuing professional development (CPD) online — something they're presumably still doing now, more than five years since the pandemic began.

Noting that different events have different ambitions, Frost said a primary objective of BSAVA's conference was to deliver a high-quality CPD program. "We have learnt that the veterinary profession now consumes its CPD in different ways, and we are adapting how we deliver this."

BSAVA Congress difficulties coincided with the rise of the London Vet Show, which was established in 2009 by CloserStill Media, a private company dedicated to running conferences. Last year, the London Vet Show attracted 6,512 delegates, its highest-ever attendance. The arrival of new events "clearly have had a dilutional effect," Frost said.

Dr. Ian Ramsey, a professor of small animal medicine at the University of Glasgow who served as president of the BSAVA from 2020 to 2021, agreed competition was a factor. He noted that conferences in other countries have met with similar fates, such as the Dutch veterinary gathering Voorjaarsdagen, which was ended in 2019. "If something is as successful as BSAVA Congress was, then it is inevitable that others will copy the idea and try to make it more profitable, often at the expense of the quality of experience," he told VIN News by email.

Ramsey concurred that recent graduates are "embracing different styles of learning." Some, he said, are entering into contracts with their employers — often large corporate consolidators — that may limit independent learning routes in favor of the company's own meetings. "Specialisation also has a role to play here, with more vets specialising sooner in their careers," Ramsey wrote. "These general CPD conferences struggle to deliver to the increasingly wide range of requirements."

The chief executive of a major exhibitor who attended BSAVA Congress for more than 30 years and is familiar with its management's thinking said it's unsurprising that a professional association would struggle to compete with a profit-driven events specialist like CloserStill Media.

"I'm deeply saddened by what's happened, but the writing's been on the wall for a long, long time," said the person, who asked not to be named because they have close ties to BSAVA leadership but aren't an official spokesperson.

"It has always been an event run by an association rather than a business organization per se — and it has been an association putting on events for members by members," the person said. "And then into the background comes a hard-nosed group of businesspeople who thought they would dip their toe in and put on a similar show, charge a similar amount and basically offer owners of small veterinary businesses an excuse to go and have a company-expensed CPD weekend in London."

The BSAVA runs smaller events, such as a Scotland-focused conference called BSAVA Alba, and will consider organizing other such gatherings in future. "We have and will continue to look at all opportunities going forward — including events on a smaller scale," Frost said.

Summing up the situation, Ramsey, the BSAVA past president, said: "My one observation is the number of people (young and old) who have told me how sad they are that BSAVA Congress has been retired, and then added, 'Mind you, I have not been for a few years ... .' "