Swine Health Professionals has officially opened its new Sheridan Room Education and Training Facility in Steinbach, MB. This education and training facility will offer swine farmworkers a hands-on opportunity to learn the veterinary procedures that will help them in their jobs.
Dr. Blaine Tully, a Veterinarian and partner with SHP, explains how the new facility will allow the practice to expand on the tradition of education and training inspired by Dr. Mike Sheridan.
“Swine Health Professionals, a swine only veterinary practice in Steinbach for 33 years evolved into a veterinary practice that’s a bit different from some traditional vet practices. In that, we focus on training, education, and developing relationships with each swine worker on farms,” said Dr. Tully. “We’re a consultative practice focussed on training and education for many years. The facility is a purpose-built facility for training and education involving the culture of biosecurity into the training facility to allow farmworkers to come in a safe and biosecure manner that isn’t going to put our practice or their farms at risk by attending any of our workshops.”
He said the training facility holds wet labs in their classroom to do some hands-on tissue prep with pigs or pig parts that will help engage them in learning actively and in a fun way.
Dr. Tully said the new education and training facility accommodates the programs SHP has developed over the years and several new programs in the pipeline.

Dr. Mike Sheridan, for whom the company named the new education and training facility, is a founding partner of their practice in Steinbach in 1987 and continued to practice for 25 years out of SHP.
Dr. Tully said SHP has six veterinarians covering Manitoba, and a little bit in Saskatchewan on farms varying in size from 200 sows to 7,000 sows and working with many different genetic suppliers and farm shapes and sizes.
“We’ve had a passion and focus for training and educating the next generation of pig farmers in Manitoba. And by opening this facility, we think we’re able to provide an engaging, fun, and interactive facility to help farmers to learn, grow, and get better at what they do,” he said. “We’ve observed over three decades of swine veterinary practice a shift from emergency medicine, where veterinarians were busy putting out health fires, to more of a preventative role. And certainly we still do both of those on a daily basis within our practice. But the shift is to having swine farm workers become more adept at some of the husbandry practices required of them. As the world around us changes with some of the antimicrobial and welfare regulations that have put more pressure on farms to do the right thing, we find it helps to have an open discussion in some of our workshops to enable workers to understand some of those principles of husbandry and how they can apply them in a better way on their farms.”
The company will continue to train on breeding and farrowing activities in barns very popular with swine workers.
Tully said to have Dr. Mike Sheridan cut the ribbon on the facility at their recent grand opening was special because of his passion for the training and education for seeing the next generation learn and grow. •
— By Harry Siemens