Dr Louise Buckley is a registered veterinary nurse and a university academic who runs a postgraduate programme that supports advanced trainee surgeons achieve their professional exit exams to obtain consultant status. She also teaches evidence-based practice across both the medical and veterinary schools and supervises multiple postgraduate and undergraduate student research projects annually. This includes Brucella canis-related topics which is a key area of academic, professional, and personal interest to her.

She holds a Pg(Dip) and PhD in animal welfare assessment, as well as undergraduate degrees in animal behavioural science and also philosophy (focusing on animal ethics). Pedagogically, she holds a postgraduate teaching certificate, in addition to the Edinburgh Teaching Award, is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (now Advance HE) and mentors human healthcare professionals to obtain Advance HE fellowship status. She has lectured veterinary and para-veterinary professionals in evidence-based veterinary medicine and related topics for 14 years across multiple higher education academic institutions.

Her wider research and professional interests include the welfare of overseas dogs, clinical animal behaviour, and evidence-based practice. She is the Deputy Editor in Chief of one veterinary journal and holds editorial board positions on two additional veterinary and animal science-focused journals.  She is an avid peer reviewer of research papers for numerous journals straddling both human and veterinary healthcare disciplines. In her very limited spare time, she is undertaking a postgraduate degree in medical statistics. She lives on a smallholding, which she shares with several dogs, including several that originate from other European countries.

She temporarily resigned from the register in May 2023 in protest over the veterinary profession’s handling of overseas rescue dogs imported into the UK and their owners. She re-registered in December 2023 confident that the veterinary profession was now beginning to move in the right direction in their handling of dogs with a Brucella canis diagnosis and is hopeful of continued improvements in this area.

Her social media page, Brucella Canis RVN was set up in April 2023 to support owners and rescue organisations to navigate Brucella canis and its handling within the UK veterinary profession and to access the information they needed to make informed decisions at each stage of the diagnostic and management. It now has 4.8k followers and has evolved into Team Brucella Canis, with volunteers now providing a wide range of volunteer support services to owners of imported dogs. It has an increasingly international reach, with Louise and the team helping owners and rescues from across the world. She is committed to supporting responsible importation, and to ensuring proportionate evidence-based measures that put contextualised compassionate care and recognition of the importance of the human-animal-bond at the heart of decision-making.  

To follow Louise’s story head over to ‘Brucella Canis RVN’ on Facebook

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