FAQs

You will be contacted at least one month in advance of your assessment taking place.

Vets will receive their annual renewal notice within the first two weeks of March.

VNs will receive their annual renewal notice within the first two weeks of October.

Your notice will be sent by email (if we have a valid email address for you). If we do not have your email address we will send your annual renewal notice to your correspondence address.

If you are a student at Bristol, Cambridge, Glasgow, Liverpool, or Nottingham, you will be presented with your certificate at your graduation ceremony.

If you are a student at Edinburgh, Surrey or the RVC, your certificate will be sent to your correspondence address in mid-August.

Your degree will be conferred on (one of) the following date(s):

• Bristol - 24 June 2024
• Cambridge - 29 June 2024
• Edinburgh - 14 May 2024 and 16 June 2024
• Glasgow - 26 June 2024
• Liverpool - 18 June 2024
• Nottingham - 14 June 2024
• Surrey - 26 June 2024
• University of London (The RVC) - 13 June 2024

If you have any questions about this, please contact your university. 

The Academy will continue to develop and launch courses on a regular basis. New courses will be announced on the homepage, and you will see them within your ‘My Academy’ area when they become available. By providing us with feedback through our surveys, you can help to guide the courses that will be available on the Academy in the future.

You will be asked to provide your availability for a period of several months. This information will then be used to work out a date that is best for all involved. We aim to identify a hearing date within three months of a matter being referred, however this is not always possible due to the availability of all those involved. Once a hearing date has been identified on, you will be notified.

The length of time that a hearing takes varies according to the number of witnesses being called, some hearings can last 2 or 3 days and some can last 3 weeks. You will not be required to attend for the whole hearing and will only be asked to attend on the day you will be giving your evidence. You will not be required to stay at the hearing after you have given your evidence. Nearer the hearing, you will be told the exact date and time you need to be there.

RCVS Council’s recommendations, including those to replace elections with an independent appointment process, will be consulted on during 2024 before any final decision on what it might recommend to government.

Changing the composition of RCVS governance would require new legislation. We therefore do not anticipate any amendment to Council’s composition until a replacement to the Veterinary Surgeons Act 1966 is introduced and ratified by Parliament. At present, there is no timetable for this.

At present there is one exam per year. The written component is normally held in Spring and is run remotely, allowing candidates to take the examination securely using their own computer from a suitable location of their choosing.

The OSCE is held at Harper Adams University in Autumn.

Specific dates are provided to candidates once they are available.

We don’t accredit any CPD courses ourselves but there are various sources of information, such as the CPD Events Calendar published in In Practice. The BVA and BVNA organise CPD events, as do universities and many commercial CPD providers.

The RCVS Knowledge Library can help you meet your continuing professional development targets. The Library holds over 30,000 books, reports and conference proceedings, all available for postal loan upon request. In addition, for a small annual membership fee, library members can enjoy access to the Library's range of electronic resources from their own computer. This includes being able to download full-text articles from a wide range of journals and carry out your own literature searches with access to millions of abstracts.

Library membership also provides substantial discounts on services such as photocopies of journal articles, postal loans, literature searches and quarterly updates. Quarterly updates are lists of bibliographic references of recently published articles on a particular subject.

To make the event more accessible, we will be holding Veterinary Nurses Day different parts of the country, the next event will be held: 

• 28 June - Assembly Rooms, 54 George Street, Edinburgh EH2 2LR

The venue is conveniently located close to various public transport links, and we would encourage you to use public transport to travel to the event where possible.

For directions, please see the venue's website.