As a current final-year student at the Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies in Edinburgh, I am experiencing first hand the impact that unanticipated global events have on a clinical education.
I should have started my hospital rotations on the 1 June, but these have been pushed back until the 24 August, meaning my cohort will have lost three months of in-person, hands-on training compared to a normal graduating class, training that is vital to mould us into competent vets by graduation.
We now feel woefully under-prepared for entering the profession
This has highlighted the drawbacks of leaving so much of our practical teaching to the last year of training. Too much reliance is placed on final-year rotations and externships, and because much of our final year has been disrupted by the pandemic, we now feel woefully underprepared for entering the profession. We need to adapt the vet degree for when events like Covid-19 strike again in the future.
I believe that earlier hands-on placements are absolutely crucial as insurance policies for future disruptions to teaching. As Jacqueline Tam suggested in an earlier My View in this journal (VR, 30 May/6 June 2020, vol 186, p 574), moving appropriate modules, such as diagnostic imaging and pharmacology, entirely online would allow students to engage with academic learning in their own time and fit this around regular clinical training sessions and placements undertaken at external, school-approved clinics at earlier stages in the degree.
By providing students with a list of approved providers who can offer long-term placements, the vet schools could enable us to reach important Day 1 competencies sooner; the clinics could use checklists and provide frequent feedback about each student to the vet school, in a manner more similar to how placements are organised for veterinary nurse students, to ensure that we are developing and building up our skills ready for graduation.
Veterinary nursing degrees require substantial hours in clinics, with students’ time divided between attending lectures at the university and completing hands-on placements. For example, the College of Animal Welfare requires vet nurse students to complete a minimum of 1800 hours of hands-on experience spread throughout their training, whereas the minimum number of clinical hours for veterinary medicine is 910 hours. This amounts to 26 weeks of clinical training, assuming a 35-hour week, 13 of which are expected to be completed in the final year of study alone. Another important point to note is that veterinary nursing placements are undertaken at RCVS-approved practices, while in comparison the clinics that vet students attend to complete their 26 weeks aren’t assessed for quality of teaching – this needs to change to ensure that all providers deliver good-quality teaching. More consistent clinical placements with providers monitoring student progress would ensure that manual skills are built up more steadily over time, rather than only being taught during intensive placements and then forgotten due to a lack of practice.
It is thought that this pandemic won’t be a unique experience. The current president of the American Veterinary Medical Association has warned that 75 per cent of emerging and re-emerging diseases are either zoonotic or vector-borne. Researchers have found that these vectors’ patterns of migration and home ranges are shifting in response to climate change, with the UK especially susceptible to the introduction of new species of mosquito, creating opportunities for novel introductions and outbreaks of exotic diseases. The incidence of infectious disease events has been found to be increasing exponentially worldwide, with researchers predicting that pandemics similar to Covid-19 will occur more frequently in the future.
Because of these predictions, I believe that it is vital to restructure the vet degree. By incorporating more online teaching alongside long-term clinical placements, the pressure put on students and staff to undertake a huge amount of clinical training in their final year of study can be relieved, and the future of veterinary education – and therefore the future of the profession – can be safeguarded against future disease-related disruption to teaching. ●
Biography
Bryanna Andrews is a final-year student at the Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies in Edinburgh.