This year I have been doing a lot more travelling to spread the word about the work we are doing and the tools and resources we’re developing to help support researchers and reviewers of research replace animals in their work. In the first week of June it was a privilege to represent our charity at the Federation of European Laboratory Animal Associations’s (FELASA) Congress in Athens, Greece, along with over 2,000 other participants from 52 countries!

It’s the first conference I have managed to get to since The Beforetimes™ (pre-COVID pandemic), and also the first time I have been out of the country since too, so it was A Very Big Thing for me.

What were we doing there?

As part of our work with Universities, we:

• have developed The Replacement Checklist as clear, practical, guidance that is actionable within existing resource, and fits into existing processes to be embedded routinely.
• revised and updated our Guide to Searching for Replacements, laying out the basic principles of searching to help people find and identify information relevant to their specific area of interest, including advice on terminology, appropriate strategies, and available resources.

But at Congress, we were running a workshop around Developing an Institutional 3Rs Strategy.

Replacement is a real struggle for many research organisations around the world, and FELASA Congress was a brilliant opportunity for us to help the research community at institutions in 52 different countries across Europe.

Developing an Institutional 3Rs Strategy is important to make sure that the whole organisation is actively engaged and participates in the 3Rs. To drive the 3Rs, aiming for the full replacement of animals, needs contribution from all key groups within that organisation, including researchers in different fields at all career stages, animal care staff, research support staff and administrators.

Everybody needs to be actively empowered, supported and engaged to recognise and take action on opportunities to develop and embed 3Rs approaches that support robust, reproducible and humane research to benefit human and animal wellbeing and the protection of the environment.

It’s no use providing a detailed guide on how to develop a Replacement First Institutional 3Rs Strategy, as all establishments are different, so there is no one size fits all. It has to be ambitious, but at the same time, realistic and achievable, and rooted in shared values, culture, priorities, policies and practice.

The demand for our workshop was so high that we had to run it twice.

Our workshop was originally the brainchild of our Chief Exec, Celean, Ngaire Dennison, Named Vet at the University of Dundee and Chair of Ireland’s National Committee for the Protection of Animals Used for Scientific Purposes, and Anja Petrie, Named Vet at the University of Aberdeen, and also Chair of our Board of Trustees.

We began with a brief presentation outlining definitions of what an Institutional 3Rs Strategy means, and then asked participants to think about what shared values and practices are important to you and your organisation? By encouraging thinking about what is important to us helps achieve the appropriate mindset to think about how we could assess the current status quo and think about where we want to be, and how we could (realistically) get there.

I then introduced how a 3Rs organisation can help before we immersed the participants in group work about addressing each of the 3Rs throughout the research process. We asked small groups to discuss only one “R”, when this R needs to be addressed, by whom, how and what information is required and what barriers need to be overcome to do it.

Once we had collected everyone’s ideas and fed them back to the group, we asked them to think about how they might apply this approach at their institution to begin the process.

What we learnt from them

When we asked participants to think about shared values, such as honesty, reliability, integrity, respect, non-maleficence and across both sessions, the top 3 ranked by delegates across both workshop sessions were care, respect and integrity.

The feedback from “addressing each of the 3Rs throughout the research process” is too much to talk about in this blog piece, but I can share some of the declarations of what they believed they can do back at their institutions.

It is important to bear in mind that these participants are representative of countries not just across the EU, but also countries outside Europe, including the US and Israel. Even within the EU, different Member States differ greatly in the extent to which they implement all of the 3Rs – not just replacement – and the US and Israel operate under very different legal, governance and ethical frameworks.

Over half the respondents thought that they could provide 3Rs training for all members of their Animal Welfare Body (AWB) and build 3Rs awareness inside and outside the animal research community. This might seem like a small ask for us, but for many establishments across the world, this will not be straightforward to implement.

I was really pleased that 16 of the 58 respondents also felt they could train their staff and implement the Replacement Checklist at their institution!

When we asked them what they could benchmark, to be able to measure how they were doing in improving processes and practice and achieving the goals of their strategy the most popular measure with over half of the group (27 out 58 respondents) selecting regular 3Rs events, with increase in replacement.

Although this is only very preliminary data, which I am obviously cherry-picking, I am hopeful that our replacement support will, in some way, empower those going back to their home institutions to begin a Replacement First 3Rs Strategy, or at least start the conversation within their communities. After all, big changes begin with small steps.

Which is true for us, too. We can only change the world one step at a time, and we need to ‘get out there’ in order to do it.