Farmscape for May 25, 2020

Improvements made by the Canada West Swine Health Intelligence Network to its quarterly Clinical Impressions Survey have dramatically improved the response rate of veterinarians.
The quarterly Clinical Impression Survey of veterinary practitioners and has been a cornerstone of Canada's swine disease surveillance system since it began in 2012.
Canada West Swine Health Intelligence Network Manager Dr. Jette Christensen says, by 2018, survey fatigue had set in and practitioners were taking quite a bit of time and quite a few reminders before completing the survey.

Clip-Dr. Jette Christensen-Canada West Swine Health Intelligence Network:
I think one of the reasons was the list of diseases that we asked for was growing.
So we decided to collaborate with out practitioners to revamp the survey so it would be easier for them to enter data, the data that we collected would fit and be more useful for our CWSHIN objective to monitor trends and provide benchmarks.
One big piece of information we were missing was that we could count the respondents but we couldn't figure out how many practices they represented and we couldn't figure out what proportion of the swine sector they would give a clinical impression on.
In 2019 we put in a lot of effort to revamp the survey completely and we got to the point in October that we could test the new questionnaire, the Clinical Impression Survey and we did that.
We used it again for the fourth quarter of 2019, so in January and now we've used it for the third time.

Dr. Christensen says, as a result of the changes, more practices and more individual vets have been contributing their clinical impressions and most importantly the proportion of premises in the region with swine on which we have clinical impressions is growing.
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Bruce Cochrane.

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