Page 8 - Autumn 17

BVA Media Training Day by Ilse Pedler, UK
As part of my CPD this year I attended a media training day at the BVA headquarters in London.
The day was run by Max Easterman and Rosie Goldsmith, two respected jour- nalists who have worked for the BBC on television and Radio on programmes such as The World Tonight, Crossing Continents and are both widely respected print journalists with many years’ experience.
The day involved training in radio and TV interviews as well as interviews for newspapers and magazines. There were four other attendees on the course, a RCVS council member and chair of the BSAVA education commit- tee, the junior vice president of the BVA, a senior rep for MSD and another practice owner like me. We had to choose topics to be interviewed on that we found challenging, these varied from the effect of Brexit on the UK vet- erinary profession, badger culling, overuse of antimicrobials and of course veterinary homeopathy. As we went round the table saying what topics we’d chosen, a collective groan went up when I said veterinary homeopathy, which wasn’t the best of starts!
The day was one of the most interest- ing and challenging CPD days I’d had in a long time. Speaking on camera and being grilled by professional journalists was both terrifying and enlightening and although I was way out of my comfort zone at times I learnt invalu- able lessons. Some of the key points for a successful interview were:
• ‘Preparation, preparation, preparation’, the more you prepare the more comfortable you will feel being interviewed.
• Choose the key message or mes- sages that you want to get across. Don’t try and cover more than three.
• Take control of an interview from the start, don’t just sit and wait for the next question, answer the ques- tion asked and then bridge to your message.
• Illustrate your point with examples that the general public can relate to. People tend to switch off when a lot of statistics are quoted but will remember the story about the sick cat.
• Never make anything up, particu- larly when quoting facts.
• Never lose your temper and never walk away from an interview.
There was a lot more, including things like:
• Don’t wear striped shirts when you are doing TV interviews as they tend to look fuzzy and
• Women, check your teeth for lip- stick before you go on camera!
Over the course of the day as we gave feedback on each other’s performances and had chance to chat, I gradually felt the rather icy atmosphere thaw and I was asked some genuine questions about homeopathy and how I used it in my practice and what I thought about vaccination etc. By the end of the day, the RCVS council member kindly told me that I wasn’t ‘a nutter’ and she also said that as long as homeopathic medi- cines were recognised by the VMD,
they couldn’t be banned and that the RCVS also couldn’t ban homeopathy without legal intervention. To be honest I felt from comments made during the day that the RCVS and BVA were far more concerned about the implications of Brexit than any other subject and veterinary homeopathy was only a minor irritation.
The other really important message I came away with is that we need to start using short effective soundbites in interviews or reply letters or on our websites, for example;
• ‘Homeopathy is a safe and effective treatment which has benefitted mil- lions of people and animals worldwide’
• ‘Homeopathy is safe and effective and without homeopathic vets, animal welfare could suffer’
Journalists love soundbites and are more likely to use them. If they use them they will then be on the internet and once they are on the internet, Google will pick up on them, when people search for vets and homeopathy and then people will be more likely to see positive statements than negative ones. The more we write them, the more people will see them. If we can do anything to start turning the current tide of negativity, maybe it’s this. So in the next few months why don’t we all get some short positive soundbite statements out there? Be general, don’t write contentious things like ‘home- opathy cures cancer’ but something along the lines of the statements above. Let’s start being positive and taking back control!
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