Empower Your Animal Science Business with the Strategic Prospecting Process for Animal science

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my enormous pleasure recording in progress got it um my great pleasure to um welcome beth greenhof to speak to us today beth and i kind of met each other while working on a giant 24 million grant that went absolutely nowhere but was still a very fun process and beth is an associate uh professor of geography human geography at the university of oxford and she's a fellow at keyboard college and her research examines the social implications of scientific innovations especially in health biomedicine and the environment and currently she's working on this very large project called the animal research network in which her part is to understand how social relations affect animal research and can generate cultures of communication and cultures with care within that so she's really interested in sort of everyday ethics and how people um really care for themselves and each other when doing what can be quite challenging work so we're really going to hear about human welfare today um and then on that topic i'll just remind everyone what we know already which is that canada's history of colonization orchestrated the displacement of first nations metis and inuit people from their ancestral lands and that the university of guelph resides on the treaty lands in the territory of the mississaugas of the credit so i acknowledge that with thanks and gratitude and without further ado over to you beth brilliant um well i'll begin by saying um thank you so much to georgia and towards the invitation to talk to you today and to quinn for all her help with with the organization all the help the organization's fantastic thank you so i've been asked to talk about our ongoing work around the culture of care in animal research and what i'd like to do with this talk is offer some insights into the kinds of qualitative research we do and how we try and understand the social relations and cultures that shape animal research mostly focusing on the uk i want to reflect on some of our research findings and i want to think about how we're using those findings to try and have an impact beyond academia by working with stakeholders to develop some new training resources for use in animal research facilities so sort of from methods to findings to impact it's the journey i want to try and map today um so broadly this is a talking four parts i want to give you a little bit of background into the rise of the culture of care in the uk and how that term sort of used in in the communities i work in a little bit more background into some of the methods we use so for those who aren't so familiar with qualitative methods the things we do to try and understand social relations and cultures i'll share a few of our findings particularly those that relate to this idea of a culture of care and ethics and practice and then in the final section i reflect on again how we're using this to work with stakeholders to try and develop this new culture of care training resource okay so without further ado what is the culture of care in the uk well we can probably trace here in the uk the origins of the term to a series of scandals in the human healthcare sector in particular investigations into malpractice at places like the nhs mid-staffordshire health trust and how these drew attention to a seemingly uncaring workplace culture and it created a sort of social unease around what we might call cold forms of care in institutional settings to put this simply there seemed to be a disconnect between the physical labor of caring for so providing food water pain relief etc and the more intangible aspects of caring about so being responsible for taking an interest in empathizing with and this led to a series of interventions that were designed to promote a culture of care within institutions things like the nhs culture of care barometer so we're trying to capture and measure some of these more intangible aspects of care and this pattern from human health care was also echoed in the animal research sector again there were a series of scandals infiltrations by the british union for the abolition of vivisection for example into imperial college london which again the response was a concern for developing this culture of care alongside a long-standing commitment to three hours of reduction refinement and replacement of animal use but some would even date this much earlier to an infiltration of huntington life sciences in 1997 where again there was a real concern with with the fact that even though husbandry was being performed there wasn't a culture caring for and about the animals within the institution there was a significant overhaul of training procedures and and staff and things like that alongside this there's also been a growing recognition um in both internal assessments and external assessments of of animal research cultures of the emotional labor involved so the idea that to work in this kind of sector you somehow have to hide your feelings in order to look professional and around issues of compassion fatigue so the idea people have a diminished capacity to empathize with the humans and animals they're working with due to sheer emotional and physical exhaustion and this is captured in the work of people like berkeley and michael keith davies here in the uk leslie sharp in the u.s new symbol and so on so it's both an interest for people working in the sector but also for academics working on this topic more broadly so what is this thing called there we go what is this thing called a culture of care well i'd say today it's something that's widely recognized in the uk and internationally i was listening to a presentation in latin america and the culture of care earlier today so definitely internationally now and it's seen as being key to the welfare of both staff and animals in animal research facilities and to the quality of science produced so in the same way good animal welfare is key to good science good welfare for staff and humans is also key to good science significantly then what distinguishes maybe the culture of care from something like the three hours of animal welfare is this emphasis on both humans and animals so it has also a care for for staff it has a care for institutional structures practices objectives and i found this definition from sally robinson and colleagues really really useful they say that a culture of care goes beyond adhering to legal requirements so it's not just complying with regulation it supports an organizational culture values of being caring and respectful towards animals and co workers it's the responsibility of everybody so there's key ideas about both shared and individual responsibility captured here it should instill responsibility and accountability in those planning and implementing research and so they can do the right thing ethically and strive for continuous improvement so some really important ideas there about how it's for people and animals how it goes beyond just complying with regulation and how it's about taking and sharing responsibility i did a brief analysis of some of the publications around culture of care and these are some of the key themes i saw emerging so these are all the different elements that are captured in some of these publications around a culture of care and you'll see it goes all the way up to sort of institutional leadership and structures so they talk about the need for strong management commitment to a culture of care they talk about a shared institutional culture a shared set of values the shared vision of the culture of care if you like a commitment animal care and welfare and to staff care and welfare this idea of shared responsibility there's an emphasis on training in some of these programs so the idea that there's an effective operational structure with clear roles and responsibilities there's good provision of training there's an emphasis on rewarding good practice so when you have a good culture of care you need to recognize promote and reward this something that people are appraised for doing empowering staff giving people the ability to speak up when they're concerned and also empowering those committees that are responsible for overseeing animal welfare and then the final two good communication which has become really important in some of the work i've been doing and also a commitment to take a culture of care into account when who you choose to work with outside an organization becomes an issue so it's not just about your own institutional culture about how you make decisions about who you want to work with is their culture of care one that aligns with your own values so there's a sort of growing series of statements and publications which try to and i've sort of listed all the references on the bottom there i can share those later but it kind of sort of reflects the growing list of benchmarks about how we identify this thing called a good culture of care so um how do i fit into this picture well i'm part of as georgia mentioned this group called the animal research nexus and this is a big program of research funded by the welcome trust that's interested in researching the people who do animal research if you like we're interested in the social relations and cultures that emerge around animal research but we're also committed to putting that research to use to try and generate new cultures of communication so to try and get all the different stakeholders we work with to to talk to each other in new ways and around difficult subjects the tools we use to do this are those are the social sciences and humanities so we spend time interviewing people we spend time doing participant observation or effectively work shouting people in their day-to-day work some of my colleagues look at archives others engage in art and performance activities and all this work is focused on trying to understand the social dynamics of the animal research community and as i said to try and generate these new cultures of communication and we hope this is the way we contribute to generating better welfare for both humans and animals and this is where i think our work really connects with the culture of care on a more day-to-day basis for me and my team specifically we're social scientists so we met mainly with interviews and participant observation and it means we spend a lot of time listening to stories told by people from across the sector working at all levels from researchers and pis through to animal technicians vets ngos and other stakeholders hearing about their experiences of working in animal research and we then try and take a systematic overview of these and look at some of the themes common themes concerns and issues that they hold together i'll just take a few moments to explain a little bit more about what i mean by by these methods so first of all it means we have a particular style of asking research questions so qualitative methods are better at answering some kinds of questions than others and a lot of our questions are concerned with the way people perceive things how they experience things and how they understand the world around them so i've just pulled out three of the questions from some recent projects um i sort of first work on animal research was with my colleague emma rowe and we really focused on junior animal technologists and we had a set of questions about how they came to terms not in terms of broad ethical principles what do you believe in but how they negotiated day to day some of the ethical challenges of their work and how they thought about what the right thing to do in particular situations was as part of the animal research nexus we've asked questions about new species and spaces so what happens in an animal research setting when you change the place you do research when you take research maybe out of laboratory into the field how do your ethics values practices translate or not when you're not working laboratory context or new species so if we've got a good understanding of what care looks like for sale laboratory mice how does that change when you're working with fish so how do some of those personal experiences of giving care receiving care understanding care change with with different species and then finally we don't always derive our own research questions we also work collaboratively with stakeholders to understand the questions that are important to them and so the final question i've listed on screen came from a collaborative agenda selling exercise where we work with stakeholders and interestingly a whole set of the questions they came back with they thought we could help with were all around a culture of care how can a culture of care be defined what does it look like when it's functioning well this this is a great question because everyone says they know when they see a good culture of care but they can't explain to me how they know it and that's the kind of thing we think is really interesting to explore as a social scientist and what factors enable or constrain its development so what things get in the way of people putting a culture of care into practice okay so some of our key methods participant observation so when i started out this project and working on animal research i'd never been in an animal research facility so some of the work that emma and i did really early on was what we call participant observation so we went into settings and we spent time hanging out with people working in these settings we looked at what they did day to day we talked about what they did today today we also actively participated in it we already tried to get a feel for what work feels like so on the screen i've shared a quote from my field work diary so participant observation is always like having two jobs because you spend the day doing the daily job you're observing and then the evening writing a really really detailed diary of everything you did and thought about that day i always tell students it's really exhausting this is an extract for one of my diaries where i'm writing about what it was like to be in the shoes of an animal technologist in this case changing water bottles on cages and the kind of things it led me to notice so it it really draws your attention to a lot of the skill involved in that work the kind of things people might do instinctively the things they know to check for it also lets you feel what that work is like how exhausting it can be so the physical labor of lifting cages in and out of racks and normal research facilities is something that i think you wouldn't pick up if you just sat down and interviewed someone you kind of have to be there and experience it um what a place smells like what it feels like to work in there and this really helped us understand and familiarize ourselves with the kind of experiences of people we'd later talk to in interviews so i talk about how sometimes the work's really repetitive and i lost track of what i was doing and i almost forgot i was working with mice and then this little nose would peek out and i'd kind of realized that the animals were there again so it's these kind of things that sensitize you to we also then follow this up with what we call in-depth interviews um and interviews again are a particular technique um they involve sacrificing i think breadth for depth so interviews can't necessarily give you a representative text sort of perspective of what every animal technologist in the uk experiences but what they can do again is sensitize you to some of the the stories behind people's particular views or experiences so for example if i did a broad survey and said to people why did you get into animal technology they'd probably say because i love animals that's that's a common reason i'm given i really wanted to work with animals what i got from interviewing people and sort of spending a bit time getting them to elaborate on that was a whole story about how they had a series of experiences of working with animals across lots of different settings so um i should add all the names of change so we always use pseudonyms for people so eleanor not her real name talks about how she worked in a kennels as a dog walker how she then went on to work in an exotic pet farm and running pony rides and what was really interesting about some of these origin stories of animal technologies is how they compared their capacity to give care to animals in different settings so often they'd say actually i like working in animal technology better than in a pet shop because i have more control over animal care and welfare than i did when i was working in some of these other settings so it's that kind of depth of story you can get out of interviews and we did repeat interviews so we talked to people three times over their first two years in the job and so you also get sensitized to how ideas of care understandings of animals change over time as you spend time working in a particular position so i think interviews are useful for getting at some of that depth and it also then raises issues that you might pursue with a wider sale quantitative study so interviews myself and give me a really good idea of what i'd want to ask in a survey if i wanted to kind of scale up and do one interviews are often quite long so it can be one to two hours so you spend a lot of time with people and you build a rapport with them and then we transcribe them so we or luckily when you're more senior you can pay someone else to do it then we'd write this out in full and we systematically analyze our field work diaries and interviews so what we do then is take all these conversations all our diary notes and we code them so we look for themes and ideas that emerge across the different people we've worked with all the different places we've worked you probably can't read the names on screen this is this image is derived from a program called nvivo which we use to code qualitative data and we label different sections of transcripts with this person who's talking about ideas of ethics or this person talking about experiences of care or this person's talking about barriers to putting care into practice and we get a kind of thematic overview of things people talk about a lot and this is how we pull out identity high key issues and shared concerns so the bigger the box broadly speaking the more people talked about it or the more time we spent talking about it it's called a sort of hierarchy map and this flags some of the themes we might want to focus on in our research okay so very whistle-stop tour there of qualitative methods but what using these methods across the chemical sector allowed us to do was track the emergence of cultures of care as a concept we began this work in 2013 and at the time a lot of the particularly more genius staff members we spoke to had never even heard of the term culture of care but over the past eight years we've seen it go from being something that that only maybe senior management made reference to to something that's been much more widely expected we also kind of pick up on how people have very different understandings of culture of care so if you raise a question of cultural care in an interview people give you very different understandings of what that means so for example for a lot of the junior technologists it was more about animal welfare senior staff had a much more sort of holistic understanding of what a culture of care was so there's some interesting themes and questions emerging there so what i'm going to do next in my finding section is share some quotes from interview material with you they're kind of representative of some of the broader themes so things a lot of people spoke about or were concerned about it doesn't imply everybody working in animal research at these levels feels this way but it does mean similar sentiments were expressed across a significant number of our participants okay so here's some of our findings the first one perhaps unsurprisingly was that the culture of care can mean very different things to different people in our research as i was saying more sydney technicians and managers spoke of this in terms of things like professional standards clean and tidy workplaces um people sort of being smart knowing what they were doing and it talked about embedding this within a workplace ethic that insists on very very high standards or a strong sense as one manager put it of how we do things around here there's also real emphasis on compliance with regulation so there's a real kind of fit with legislation there when we went into the animal facility and talked to the animal technologists or the animal care staff though the phrase culture of care captured something very different to them and it was about a shared disposition to care for animals um and so they talked about how it was not just one person who cares but for them a culture of care was expressed in the way people related to animals so this kind of picked up for us there's lots of different definitions so everyone might agree there's a good culture of care but they might be thinking very different things when they agree to that statement a second sort of key finding was around communication as i flagged earlier so making sure everyone involved in the animal used care and welfare feels able to share their concerns and experiences emerged as an ongoing challenge for especially junior staff so here's carrie on screen talking about some of her experiences and she says there are certain things that you see and want to change and at the minute it's kind of like i don't want to step on anyone's feet and she's articulating quite a common sentiment about feeling concerned on something but don't know when it's legitimate to raise that as the concern i find it quite challenging she says to know where the lines is and it's really interesting to see this sense of being unable to speak or not qualified to speak reflected in sort of broader ways so at a recent animal technology congress here in the uk penny hawkins and colleagues were interested in whether animal technologies wanted to join their local ethical review board and they found that well 82 percent of participants these sort of animal technologists would like to be on the ethical review board only about 34 acted on that and that again reflects this idea of not feeling able to to speak to articulate therefore we can say that it's not just rules and regulations maybe that define a practice of care but also institutional environments and cultures the culture that gives people a feeling they can speak up or not in practical terms this leads the imperative that we need to do more to address this sense of powerless maybe amongst junior staff and so they feel more empowered to speak up thirdly we can think about how institutional and workplace cultures can create obstacles to delivering good care so sources of pressure can vary between the different sites of animal research and in our research we've seen people talk about pressures like the funding and publication pressures you get in academic establishments or the pressures for a fast turnaround dynamic experiments you might find in more client-focused settings so in the private sector other pressures seem to be more generalized across different kinds of research institutes so we might think about things like staff shortages or the burdens that staff face during the recent pandemic to work longer hours to cover sick colleagues to work away from home or to cull larger numbers of animals because work was delayed or suspended due to kovac 19. so there's both kind of distinctive pressures and different kinds of establishments but also shared pressures as well the results of these pressures though are often very similar with staff at all levels from technicians to name people and researchers having to make really really difficult decisions and perform complex careful and vital work while being increasingly emotionally and physically exhausted and this really came across in some of our interviews so here's debbie and fiona again not their real names talking about how they've been working at the same place for two years and taken on more responsibility and here they're talking about staffing staffing they say is majorly important because all that stress is put on you and it affects you and then you're making mistakes we're all human um and you feel bad for it but i wasn't you know i was trying to concentrate what i was doing and i wouldn't have made my mistake and then she says how she went home and that mistake kind of stayed with her and you're back into it the same day and what she's articulating i think is what a lot of people experience about how being under pressure can kind of compromise your ability if not to care for the animals then maybe to care to care for yourself and bella williams has also talked about this in more depth in her examination of cultures of care and animal research and she says how human carers work with and interpret the needs of animals but their ability to do this depends on also how human human interactions play out in these contexts okay and so a final set of findings thinks about how different ideas of care aren't always easily sitting alongside each other so one of my sort of go-to examples of this is innovations in husbandry practice so these are often undertaken to improve both staff and animal welfare in animal research facilities but often they don't always sit easily alongside things like the fact junior animal technicians really like interacting and handling animals so here's claire talking about the introduction of individually individually ventilated cages so going from a system where animals are kept in sort of open cages to these sort of more plastic boxes or individually ventilated cases with their own air conditioning system and she talks about how she prefers conventional caging to ivcs as she called them they're basically in a box you look at that mouse in a box and it's just doing what it would do whereas mice kept in a conventional box you can kind of pull the racks out and she talks about how when the cages were open the mice would sort of smell her coming and she'd see them react to her and she felt she had a relationship that she was part of their world and then she kind of flips back and says that i know that ivcs are better for animal health and i know that maybe they're better for human health and she talks about swings and roundabouts and i think her description here really captures how this new innovation this individually ventilated cage enables good care it's better in terms of biosecurity it might be better for the sort of health of the mice it might be better for the health of the technicians because there's not an exposure to things like animal allergens so we're often told these are a health benefit but it also takes away something it takes away something of that human animal connection and that's a very important resource for a lot of the animal technologies we spoke to because when when they've had a really bad day one of the things they like to do is spend time handling and interacting with the animals so this is something that makes care possible but also stops it being possible in interesting ways okay so hopefully that's given you a flavor of some of the ways our research kind of gives insights into just how complex a culture of care can be um i think the next interesting question is other than write academic style papers like those as i reference what might we do with some of this research and that's what i want to focus on for the final section of my talk as i think it's kind of evident a culture of care is complex and multifaceted and this means it's difficult to talk about it also means it's difficult to teach so increasingly regulators are sort of mandating institutions to promote a culture of care but but how do you do that in practice and i think it can be really challenging because it's hard to find space to talk about something that's quite emotional quite reflexive about values about experiences in a very intense and pressured working environment and there are a lot of spaces what i was also aware that when i presented my research like i did you now two audiences of animal research stakeholders like animal technologists or researchers the thing that really connected them was the quotes it was the stories told by people like them about their experiences in the workplace and putting these two things together i wondered if storytelling could offer a new approach to training a new way of getting people to talk about and think about cultures of care so we were lucky enough to receive some knowledge exchange funding so this is money that's specifically about translating academic research for stakeholders and we put together or i put together working with stakeholders from industry from academia from non-governmental organizations this project which was aimed at developing a new training session which was all about the culture of care it was about creating an open reflexive um safe space to talk about some of the challenges of what a culture of care is and how we put into practice and the object of the project or what it revolved around was using stories now importantly these weren't lifted directly from the research they were fictionalized so we worked with a scriptwriter and she basically came up with mini plays i suppose you could call them based on some of the experiences of our interviewees and we use these as a resource around which we built a training workshop so we developed this over a period of months we reviewed current training provision and established a list of key learning outcomes um like any training resource not every training resource can meet every objective so we had a list of things we were trying to achieve and then we worked with a scriptwriter to develop test and pilot these stories we've now got three of these scripts and we're working on more and we've got a sort of whole workshop we built this around which we actually ran at guelph earlier earlier this week the kind of things we were trying to get up with this workshop we're helping people think about the fact there are these different understandings of cultures of care at play to think about what a positive workplace culture might be to think about ideas of shared responsibility how we can promote effective communication how we can empower different people within animal research facility encourage respect across different roles within a research facility and think about the emotional division of labour so when in a particular sort of time scale of a project people might be under particular pressure or called on to do really emotionally demanding aspects of work in practice the workshop's got a number of bits um we start out with an introduction with some icebreaking activities so um we've been encouraging people to try and draw animals in less and less time so one of our icebreakers is getting people to draw an animal in 30 seconds then 20 seconds and then 10. and my colleague my scriptwriter was really really keen on this and she explained to me how important icebreakers were in creating a kind of safe space we then do two different versions of the scripts and there's a whole series of questions for discussion there's some reflections and then a feedback survey at the end i just want to emphasize how key the scripts are to doing this because i think often training activities can be quite dissemination focused so you know you work through a series of slides you give people a powerpoint you might even give them a scenario but the different that scripts make is it by reading a role people are really encouraged to empathize and to kind of put themselves in someone else's shoes a lot of the roles are maybe slightly caricatured and they've done that deliberately to stimulate debate but they also kind of get people to try and put themselves in someone else's shoes and kind of empathize with different experiences and perspectives and we often get people to read roles that aren't their own so in an animal research facility we might get a care staff member to read the vet's role and a researcher to read the care staff's role so again it kind of builds this idea of empathy and the idea is by the time we get to discussion people feel relaxed enough to share their own stories and experiences and understandings of what a culture of care is [Applause] so again each script is followed up by a series of discussion points um asking people to think about the different kinds of work involved whether they've got any similar experiences how they might play this scenario differently if it is happening in their workplace and then um because we've added all these online thanks to covid we've used various online whiteboard tools to encourage people to share their reflections about the workshop um one of the key challenges for any of this kind of activity is is how do we encourage people to take it away and how do we get it to stick with them and we've explored various things like asking people to write postcards to their future self to remind them of the kind of things the workshop sparked at the time and we've used as i said tools like jamboard or online whiteboards where people can share their immediate responses to the session okay and then finally um it seems to be working so far so when we ask people what they enjoyed about the sessions we do seem to be able to use stories to create this sense of openness to create a platform to talk about emotions without being too critical or too emotive it seems to be successful in getting people to talk across different groups to to understand things from a vet's perspective or a researcher's perspective or to think about things from it from a different side of the story it can highlight key things people know already and makes them reflect maybe more deeply on them but also maybe gives people some new insights for example at the bottom someone's saying how they'll be more aware of how they empower and communicate with others i've seen some really interesting reflections from more senior staff members about how they feel responsibility for creating a good culture of care within their unit or a good culture of communication within their unit and again it seemed quite successful at getting people to see things from a different perspective they talked about how role play in particular was really useful for doing this um things we need to work on i think one of the challenges we face with this is is i started out this project designing something as a really small face-to-face group activity and then i got hit by a pandemic and had to turn what was supposed to be a really convenient interactive session into something on zoom and i think empathy is hard enough on zoom anyway and when you're all wearing face marks it's even harder so i'm really looking forward hopefully in the future to try some of these things face to face because i think they might work even better then we were also pushed to develop more scripts so i think because of where i started my research working with animal technologists i'm a little bit technologist biased and so now we're working to develop scripts from for example the perspective of early career researchers i think face some real challenges when it comes to trying to put a culture of care into perspective um and i've got some more funding to do this which is great we're currently developing more scripts we're going to try some things out face to face and maybe explore other ways we can use storytelling to promote ideas around a culture of care maybe even in different research sectors beyond animal research okay i think i've probably talked for long enough now hopefully that's given given a sense of what i'm doing and how i'm doing it um i'd love to hear your questions i should give a huge shout out to all my stakeholders um i'm presenting this as my research but it wouldn't be possible without the amazing support i've received from people across the sector so so that that's worth acknowledging and georgia asked me to share this slide with you all i'm not sure if nelson