In Irish and european farms vet practitioners struggle to communicate their key messages around herd health and disease prevention. In this paper we have effectively combined two communication concepts to enable the farmer with the vet engage in planning to improve herd health.

1.'Feed Forward' where  instead of the inherent criticism associated with 'feed back', the vet and farmer collectively look forward to upcoming farm events (eg the next calving season) and prepare to plan how to minimise impact of disease and improve herd health. Feed forward prepares and enables the farmer for positive action.

2. 'Adapted Motivational Interviewing' where we have developed a 'Herd Health Hook' document that not only segments key herd health areas on farm but also embraces the components of motivational interviewing to encourage collaberative conversations between the farmer and vet in order to strengthen the farmers motivation and commitment to change towards adopting best practices in herd health. In this process we practice empathetic listening and use core interviewing skills including asking open questions, affirming what the farmer feels, reflecting and summarizing. These conversations focus the farmers efforts, evoke or draw out the farmers own views (rather than the vet tradition of imposing ideas or lists for corrective action).The vet resists using the 'righting reflex' but instead rolls with the resistance and the motivation to change occurs when the farmer percieves a mismatch between "where they are and where they would like to be". 

By using 'motivational Interviewing' combined with 'positive feed forward' the vet seeks to guide the farmer towards "change talk". Our findings, supported by research, demonstrate a clear correlation between farmer talk of change and herd health outcomes.The farmer is ready to engage in collaborative herd health planning with the vet. 



Author:
Mr Frank O SULLIVAN MVB MSc(food Science) Mrcvs Patrick Farrelly and Partners,Dublin Road, Trim,County Meath,Ireland