Members of the decision making body for the Canadian Swine Health Intelligence Network, a Canadian Swine Health Board Initiative, were joined by representatives of government, pork industry stakeholders and animal health professionals in Calgary this week for a disease simulation workshop.

The goal of the exercise was to test the functionally of the IT systems and the veterinary communications network that have been developed and to build relationships.

Dr Chris Byra, a veterinarian with Greenbelt swine veterinary services and the manager of the CSHIN management team, says a few key themes emerged including questions about who would take the lead in the event of an animal health issue.

Dr Chris Byra- Canadian Swine Health Intelligence Network

Quite often there didn't appear to be leadership taken during the response to a disease occurrence and so how to identify that was one of the lessons that we learned.

It became quite clear, it's quite situational.

In certain cases it may be a province that leads, in others it may be somebody in one of the federal departments, sometimes it might be the industry.

We presented a proposal at the end and the proposal was that the Swine Health Board would be involved in trying to identify problems and where we identified an event first we would probably initially play a facilitator role bringing all the stakeholders together that might be involved in that and trying to identify where leadership would emerge from.

In cases where we didn't identify things initially but we've been asked for assistance with our data or with our veterinary network we would probably play a more passive role.

Where nobody seems to be taking the lead and yet industry feels it's important we may end up taking that position of leadership.

Dr Bryra says the information gathered through the workshop will now be used by CSHIN as it completes the development of its governance document and strategy.