How to apply

We offer a wide range of grants, suitable for each stage of your veterinary and/or research career. Take a look at the funding we provide here

Each type of grant that we offer has its own application form, but the required information is similar for each. We ask for the following:

1. General

  • Details of the applicant/coapplicants including contact details, qualifications, and current posts
  • The study title, its proposed start date, and duration
  • A lay summary to help us with promotion and publicity of the project
  • The research question and background behind it
  • Proposed methods and experimental design
  • Details of outcome timings and planned analyses
  • Proposed benefits to animals in the study and the future
  • Details of previous submissions of the same or related proposals

2. Funding

  • Current and past funding details
  • A breakdown of expected costs

3. Student support for our MDR and SRP grants

  • Supervisory details
  • Information about planned student training

4. Peer review (not required for SRP grants)

  • Names and contact details of three external reviewers
  • We ask the reviewers to independently review your application, so you should have no conflicts of interest with any of them. We consider a conflict to include:
    • Being an applicant or co-applicant in the current round of BSAVA PetSavers’ grants,
    • Collaborating recently (within the last 2 years),
    • Involvement in your current BSAVA PetSavers grant proposal, including advising on study design or commenting on the application,
    • Having a close personal friendship, or
    • Currently working in the same institution

If your suggested reviewers are unable to assess your application, we reserve the right to ask another independent reviewer to do so.

5. Grant ethics

Applicants from practice who do not have access to ethical review through a university are advised to apply for ethical review through the RCVS Ethics Review Panel.

Please submit details about the following ethics-related aspects on our grant application form:

  • Recruitment and informed consent
  • Animal welfare
  • Risks and their management
  • Inducements to participation
  • Data protection
  • Conflicts of interest
  • You are also required to provide supporting paperwork of your ethical committee approval

6. CVs of all applicants

  • Name
  • Current post (title, institution/ practice, date of appointment)
  • Posts held within the last 10 years
  • Details of previous research experience or training (include title, amount and source of funding)
  • Relevant publications (list up to 10, give the citation in full, including the title of the paper and list all of the authors)
  • Additional information that relates directly to the application (use up to 10 lines of text)

7. Supporting documents

As well as the ethical approval documents, please also supply:

  • A letter of support from your head of department or practice principal (not required for SRP grants)
  • A signed copy of the BSAVA PetSavers’ terms and conditions for the relevant grant

The application form contains a checklist to help make sure that the application is complete which we ask that you use!

If you have any questions about the grant application process, please email petsaversadmin@bsava.com

Our main application and supporting forms can be downloaded here:

 

What happens after you apply?

Applications are not anonymised because we have found it impossible to do so in what is a fairly small veterinary world. However, the grants awarding committee and external reviewers are required to declare any conflicts of interest with individual applications before reviewing them, as described above. If a reviewer declares a conflict an alternative reviewer is chosen, while committee members with a conflict refrain from voting on that application.

Your application will undergo a preliminary review then be peer reviewed by external reviewers, before being considered and scored during a meeting of the BSAVA PetSavers’ grants awarding committee. You may be given the chance to respond to unattributed reviewer comments before the voting stage of the process.

Committee meetings are held in the spring and autumn. MDR applications submitted by 31st August are considered in the spring meeting, and CRP applications submitted by 31st January are considered in the autumn. We aim to decide whether to fund SRPs within 6 weeks of the three annual application cutoff dates. Further details can be found in the How we decide what we fund link.

Some applicants may be asked further details about their proposals based on queries that arose during the committee meeting. The responses to these queries will aid the committee in making a final decision.

We will notify you of our decision shortly after the relevant committee meeting. If you have been unsuccessful, we will provide detailed feedback on which aspects of your application could be improved. You are welcome to resubmit your application once more in a future round of grant calls as long as this is made clear on the application form.

If successful, you will receive a letter confirming the decision and total project costs and specifying the date by which the project must commence. You will also be advised how to invoice and on reporting and publication processes, and will be asked for a digital image to help publicise your project. We also require a formal letter from you accepting the grant and specifying the project start date.