Kenwyn Veterinary Centre
Established fifteen years ago, Kenwyn is a dedicated large animal veterinary practice based in Truro and covering most of mid Cornwall.
The six vets at the practice provide a service to many farms and horse owners in the area.
Peter Sowerby, one of the partners, says ‘Broadband has made a huge difference to the way we run the practice as well as allow us to provide a better service to our customers.’
Kenwyn installed broadband in April 2006 and almost immediately noticed the improvements in efficiency it brought them.
‘Now we deal with DEFRA and most of our suppliers online. Laboratory reports can be received by email and we order from our suppliers online where we can. This not only saves us time, it also makes everything much more accurate. When you’re dealing with cow ear tags, the difference of just one digit is significant.’
With support from actnow, Kenwyn also introduced farming specific software called ‘Interherd’ to improve the service they can offer to their dairy farm clients and provide veterinary advice about how to improve the efficiency of their herd.
Jon Mouncey has helped develop this side of our service. Jon says ‘With Interherd, the records from the milk recorders are collated and sent through to us online. We can then analyse the milk production data and, in conjunction with our knowledge of the herd from our on-farm visits, we can use this information to recommend mastitis control and milk quality programmes as well as provide tailored advice about fertility and nutrition.
We are able to present this information to the farmer with graphs and other visual devices that makes the situation very clear. This definitely adds real value to the service we provide.
Our farm clients that have benefited from this new service are delighted. Just the other day a farmer said to me that this has helped improve his milk quality and he was no longer incurring milk price penalties.’
Kenwyn has also established a network in their surgery and find that this too has increased their efficiency. ‘The next step’ says Peter ‘is to develop our own website. Then we can provide more information direct to the client so that we can spend more time treating our patients and advising our clients'.
