Many of the animal health challenges faced on production animal farms are preventable. Decades of research have provided a wide range of evidence-based practices to reduce the prevalence of preventable disease, and yet these practices are not always implemented on farm. This is a problem not just confined to veterinary medicine and has been well recognized as a challenge in human healthcare too. This led to the emergence of the field of ‘implementation science’ – the backbone of which is the use of formal constructs to promote uptake of evidence-based approaches.

The aim of this project is to test the application of existing implementation science approaches on farms, working with a number of vets and farmers to understand the barriers and facilitators (including personal, interpersonal and contextual environments) to adoption of preventive practices and using these to guide implementation. This work will culminate in the development of a bespoke veterinary-specific implementation framework to facilitate uptake of preventive practices on farm.