A new scenario post-pandemic reveals that veterinarians are facing a significant workload in their daily work at clinics. To help address this challenge, the Purina Institute has created CentreSquare, a free online toolkit of user-friendly, science-based pet nutrition information for veterinary practices.
The CentreSquare resource offers a wide range of clinic tools, including staff training videos, nutrition briefs, nutrition conversation starters and client handouts.
“Even before the pandemic, the reality was that while four out of five pet owners said they wanted pet nutrition advice from their veterinarians, only one in five veterinarians was proactively discussing nutrition with clients,” said Daniel Rodes, DVM, PhD European Leader for the Purina Institute.
“If veterinarians and clinic staff members don’t lead the nutrition dialogue, their clients will look for answers elsewhere – often from unreliable sources.
“We believe it is time for veterinary professionals to take back those important conversations.”
At the same time, Daniel noted new market insights determined that Veterinary Health Care team has a tremendous workload that penalizes the time they can devote to maintain a long enough conversations with their clients about nutritional issues.
These same time constraints also make it complicated for clinic staff to keep updated about nutritional trends and provide accurate messages to their clients.
CentreSquare users can filter nutrition information by species, life stage, material format and length of read or watch time.
The online nutrition toolkit includes training assets that can help staff members as well as veterinary students who are transitioning to a clinic environment.
Information is presented in formats that are easy to share with pet owners.
In a pilot study (2021) of 74 veterinary professionals in the US and Canada, 92 percent of surveyed professionals agreed that the information on CentreSquare was relevant, while 85 percent agreed the information was easy to relay to pet owners.
A separate survey (2021) of 52 veterinary students found that 96 percent said that the site assets increased their confidence to initiate conversations with pet owners about nutrition.
Meanwhile, 93 percent of veterinary professionals and 100 percent of veterinary students were likely to recommend CentreSquare to their peers.
Along with testing the usefulness of the CentreSquare site to veterinary professionals and students, The Purina Institute consulted with leaders in nutrition education to ensure the toolkit assets were meeting the objective of facilitating better nutrition conversations.
Professor Myriam Hesta, DVM, PhD, Dip ECVCN, veterinary nutritionist at the University of Ghent in Belgium, said:“[CentreSquare] will make practitioners more confident to talk about a variety of nutritional questions for which owners often seek the advice of their veterinarian, including the trending nutritional topics. It will also make them more confident to address more difficult nutritional topics like obesity.
“As nutrition is key in the health of our pets, this will improve the pet´s well-being and this the goal of every veterinarian.”
The CentreSquare site is divided into six major information categories: life stage nutrition, focused nutrition, therapeutic nutrition, understanding pet food, nutritional and clinical assessment tools and nutrition conversations.
In keeping with the educational mission of the Purina Institute, CentreSquare assets carry the Institute logo but do not position or mention Purina diets.
CentreSquare is currently available in English, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, French, Italian and German.
To find out more about the nutrition toolkit and how to incorporate these resources into practices, visit the Purina Institute website.
