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News & Reports AVS congress
Students look to the future The future of the veterinary profession formed the theme for this year’s congress of the Association of Veterinary Students, held at Nottingham veterinary school on January 25 and 26. Topics under discussion included the RCVS’s Professional Development Phase and the new veterinary school at the University of Surrey. Students were also encouraged to take a stand on animal welfare issues by guest speaker Marc Abraham. Laura Honey reports Following a short welcome from Gary England, dean of Nottingham veterinary school, the first day of the congress began with a presentation from guest speaker Marc Abraham, TV vet and animal welfare campaigner. His overriding message to the students was: ‘If you ever come across something that you’re not happy with, disagree with, or feel strongly against, then do what you can to change it.’ Describing his career, Mr Abraham said that he had initially worked in mixed and small animal practices and then, after 18 months, had decided to work a snowboarding season in Val d’lsere. He told the students that it was during his time in Val d’lsere that he had learnt the importance of customer service. ‘I recommend everyone to get a bar job or job in a busy pub and learn your customer service early, as it really makes such a difference to your business in the future,’ he said. When starting out in practice, the thing that would help them to be better vets and differentiate them from other graduates would be their customer service skills. His media career had come about ‘completely by chance’, he said, when the TV programme ‘It’s me or the dog’, hosted by Victoria Stilwell, visited his practice in
Brighton and asked to film a vet in action. On the back of this, he went on to do a onehour dog and obesity special with Ms Stilwell, which led to him being cast for the Paul O’Grady show, where he took part in the pet clinic, shown every two weeks to an audience of 4 million. Mr Abraham said that, from this work, he had learnt that TV was the ultimate medium for education: it allowed a vast audience to be reached in a short space of time and educated on things such as the importance of microchipping or vaccination. His current role in the media was, he said, ‘all educational and about raising awareness’ and about Students attending the congress took part in a number of practicals and animal handling exercises throughout the weekend, including campaigning for change. reptile dissection and avian and guinea pig handling Giving an example, he explained that he had decided to set up a campaign to he worked for in Brighton. ‘I found out that raise awareness of puppy farming after they were all coming from a puppy farm witnessing high mortality among puppies just outside Brighton,’ he said: ‘I had had coming into the emergency service clinic no idea just how bad the puppy farming
February 15, 2014 | Veterinary Record | 159
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News & Reports
Nic Wojciechowski hands over the role of AVS president to Alex McGhee
industry had got and so I decided to set up a campaign.’ The resulting campaign, ‘Pup Aid’, got bigger and bigger and Mr Abraham ended up going to Parliament to raise awareness of puppy farming. He explained that, as part of the campaign, he had started an e-petition, with the aim of gathering the 100,000 signatures required for the subject to be considered for debate by the House of Commons. ‘Within six months, with a huge Twitter and Facebook campaign, supported by the likes of Ricky Gervais, we reached 100,000,’ he said. ‘I now go to Parliament weekly to speak and campaign and it’s a fantastic place for animal welfare and to campaign.’ ‘My point is that if you really want to change something in the animal world there are ways and vehicles of doing it,’ he said. Concluding, he said: ‘My main message for the future of the profession is to be kind, caring vets and get out there in the community, as that’s where your clients are.’ ‘I think that it is really important to make sure that every interaction you have with the client is animal welfare-related and to make sure that you shout about it.’
Professional Development Phase Following a black tie ball at Colwick Hall on the Saturday night, students were ready for the second day of congress, which began with a talk on the RCVS’s Professional Development Phase (PDP), the selfassessment system launched in 2009. The need for such a system had first been recognised in 2000, when an education steering group had been set up to look at the process of continued veterinary development, from qualification onwards, explained Julian Wells, an RCVS postgraduate dean. The steering group was particularly concerned about the practical application of the knowledge gained from 160 | Veterinary Record | February 15, 2014
the veterinary degree, but even more so by the lack of support new graduates were receiving in practice. It approached all species sectors under the umbrella of BVA and each suggested skills that should be measurable by the end of a graduate’s first year in practice. Mr Wells noted that the PDP was first launched as a voluntary system, but had since been incorporated into the Code of Professional Conduct and also into the Practice Standards Scheme meaning that, these days, it was more or less compulsory. The purpose of the scheme was to help new graduates keep a record of the cases they had seen and the skills they had used in order to gain a level of competence by the end of their first year in practice. ‘One of the many questions we, as deans, get asked is “how do I know when I am competent?”,’ said Mr Wells. He explained that the PDP system aimed to help graduates answer this question and improve their level of confidence in practice. The system was a web-based record, where graduates could keep an experience log to monitor how many skills they had completed within a particular skill set, as well as to establish where there were gaps in their competence that needed addressing. ‘Don’t forget that this is a major contribution to your CPD obligations in your first year,’ he reminded the students. Explaining how the system worked, he said the RCVS invited graduates to join the database and sent them log in details to access the site. The log set out various skills, divided up by species groups, and it allowed graduates to record skills, such as a routine vaccination or performance of a bitch spay. The point was not to keep record of how many times a particular skill was undertaken, but rather to mark the point at which a graduate felt that they had achieved competence in that area. ‘It doesn’t matter whether you have logged 10 routine vaccines or 500 routine vaccines,’ said Mr
Wells. ‘As soon as you have reached that stage of competence, then you clearly don’t need to add any more of that particular skill.’ Once a graduate believed they had reached a level of competence in all skill areas that they would be using regularly, a senior colleague, who had witnessed their progress, needed to sign off the portfolio. The RCVS did not expect graduates to have gained experience of every skill in every discipline listed on the log and be confident in all of them; rather, it was looking for a range of skills to have been covered in the area of practice in which a graduate would be working and for them to have reached a confidence level of over 90 per cent in the areas they had covered. Mr Wells also highlighted the importance of the notes section, which was designed to be used to indicate the progression from the first time a particular skill was undertaken in practice to the point where the graduate had reached competence in that area. He suggested that half a dozen notes per section would be sufficient to help the deans decide whether the portfolio was ready to be signed off. At the end of the presentation, Peter Harlech Jones, past-president of the BVA, asked Mr Wells what advice he would give to new graduates who struggled to get support from their practice for doing their PDP. Mr Wells replied that many practices were part of the Practice Standards Scheme and, as part of that scheme, it was necessary for practices to demonstrate how they were supporting new graduates. He also said that it was up to the graduate to question practices at interview to determine how they would support PDP.
Surrey vet school
Introducing a talk by Gail Anderson, head of veterinary education at the University of Surrey, Alex McGhee, the newly elected president of the AVS, urged students to keep an open mind and remember that ‘Surrey is happening and so we should engage and work with some of the positives and negatives of that’.
t
The outgoing AVS committee at the congress ball: (front row, from left) Alex Andryszak, Matthew Erskine, Alex McGhee, Jenny Brazier, Helena Diffey, Suzy Hudson-Cooke; (back row, from left) Marcel Hanley, Felicity Barber, Lisa Main, Amy Fitzgerald, Jamie McColl, Jennie McMullan, Gemma Longson, Jon Mayer, Sarah Boland, Georgie Lethbridge, Tom Cantor, Nic Wojciechowski, Tom Bayes, Max Foreman, Craig Fairbairn, Dom Byron Chance, Will Bayton, Eleanor Myerscough, Chris Ogden, Vicky Carliell, Dan Cooper
Downloaded from http://veterinaryrecord.bmj.com/ on June 19, 2015 - Published by group.bmj.com
News & Reports t
Professor Anderson began by telling students why the university wanted a vet school in the first place. Among other things, she said that Surrey was well placed within the medical health and research sector and was keen to expand this to veterinary medicine as well. The new vet school would sit within the human medical sphere at the university, which was already well ranked both nationally and internationally, and the university was keen to be very focused on the idea of One Health. One student asked how many applications Surrey had received for its first intake in October 2014. Professor Anderson replied that 747 applications had been received for 45 places and 300 interviews had been offered. After the first year, the university expected the number of students to rise to around 100, but it needed to start with a small cohort due to the fact that the vet school buildings would not be completed until the end of June 2015; other teaching facilities within the university would be used for the first year. She explained that the course would not be dissimilar in structure to that at Nottingham. There would be a strong emphasis on clinical reasoning and competencies, with the hope that this would lead to an easier transition into practice compared with some of the more traditional
curricula. ‘The other thing that is quite different is that it is very much a global view, rather than just a UK view,’ she said, which would be supportive and encouraging to students who wanted to look into nontraditional areas in veterinary medicine. The vet school would be sited on an in-town campus, without access to a remote campus or teaching hospital. Professor Anderson explained that, to overcome this problem, the university had formed partnerships with the Pirbright Institute and practices such as Westpoint, Fitzpatrick Referrals and Liphook as well as 60 additional practices that would help final-year students complete their intramural rotations. A student asked whether Surrey would be actively encouraging these partner practices to take on students from other vet schools as well. Professor Anderson replied that, yes, it would be, adding ‘the practices are keen to see students from all the different vet schools and, obviously, one of the things they’re doing with EMS is looking at students as potential employees’. She also reassured the students that the big referral practices that Surrey was in partnership with would continue to take students from other vet schools and this was something that the university would be encouraging. Describing how the course would be structured, she said that the first year would be very much focused on the normal,
healthy animal, with a system-by-system approach, working from the cellular level through to the organism as a whole. The second year would focus on discovering the abnormal, incorporating pathology and the concepts of epidemiology and public health. The emphasis in the third year would be returning the animal to normal once a diagnosis had been made. Students would also be required to undertake a research project, culminating in a 10,000-word dissertation, which would be the equivalent of a full BSc research programme. A species-by-species approach to the role of the vet as an educator would be the focus of the fourth year, and students would also have spay and neuter clinics over two semesters. The final year would be dedicated to intramural rotations, but these would be undertaken at the partner practices, rather than at the university itself. ‘What will your methods of assessment be?’ asked one of the students. Professor Anderson replied that these would comprise a mixture of multiple choice questions, practical assessments, online quizzes, peerassessment, objective structured clinical examinations and short answer type exams. She added that students would build up a clinical portfolio over the five years and this would also be assessed. doi: 10.1136/vr.g1418
February 15, 2014 | Veterinary Record | 161
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Students look to the future
Veterinary Record 2014 174: 159-161
doi: 10.1136/vr.g1418 Updated information and services can be found at: http://veterinaryrecord.bmj.com/content/174/7/159
These include:
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To request permissions go to: http://group.bmj.com/group/rights-licensing/permissions To order reprints go to: http://journals.bmj.com/cgi/reprintform To subscribe to BMJ go to: http://group.bmj.com/subscribe/
News & Reports AVS congress
Students look to the future The future of the veterinary profession formed the theme for this year’s congress of the Association of Veterinary Students, held at Nottingham veterinary school on January 25 and 26. Topics under discussion included the RCVS’s Professional Development Phase and the new veterinary school at the University of Surrey. Students were also encouraged to take a stand on animal welfare issues by guest speaker Marc Abraham. Laura Honey reports Following a short welcome from Gary England, dean of Nottingham veterinary school, the first day of the congress began with a presentation from guest speaker Marc Abraham, TV vet and animal welfare campaigner. His overriding message to the students was: ‘If you ever come across something that you’re not happy with, disagree with, or feel strongly against, then do what you can to change it.’ Describing his career, Mr Abraham said that he had initially worked in mixed and small animal practices and then, after 18 months, had decided to work a snowboarding season in Val d’lsere. He told the students that it was during his time in Val d’lsere that he had learnt the importance of customer service. ‘I recommend everyone to get a bar job or job in a busy pub and learn your customer service early, as it really makes such a difference to your business in the future,’ he said. When starting out in practice, the thing that would help them to be better vets and differentiate them from other graduates would be their customer service skills. His media career had come about ‘completely by chance’, he said, when the TV programme ‘It’s me or the dog’, hosted by Victoria Stilwell, visited his practice in
Brighton and asked to film a vet in action. On the back of this, he went on to do a onehour dog and obesity special with Ms Stilwell, which led to him being cast for the Paul O’Grady show, where he took part in the pet clinic, shown every two weeks to an audience of 4 million. Mr Abraham said that, from this work, he had learnt that TV was the ultimate medium for education: it allowed a vast audience to be reached in a short space of time and educated on things such as the importance of microchipping or vaccination. His current role in the media was, he said, ‘all educational and about raising awareness’ and about Students attending the congress took part in a number of practicals and animal handling exercises throughout the weekend, including campaigning for change. reptile dissection and avian and guinea pig handling Giving an example, he explained that he had decided to set up a campaign to he worked for in Brighton. ‘I found out that raise awareness of puppy farming after they were all coming from a puppy farm witnessing high mortality among puppies just outside Brighton,’ he said: ‘I had had coming into the emergency service clinic no idea just how bad the puppy farming
February 15, 2014 | Veterinary Record | 159
Downloaded from http://veterinaryrecord.bmj.com/ on June 19, 2015 - Published by group.bmj.com
News & Reports
Nic Wojciechowski hands over the role of AVS president to Alex McGhee
industry had got and so I decided to set up a campaign.’ The resulting campaign, ‘Pup Aid’, got bigger and bigger and Mr Abraham ended up going to Parliament to raise awareness of puppy farming. He explained that, as part of the campaign, he had started an e-petition, with the aim of gathering the 100,000 signatures required for the subject to be considered for debate by the House of Commons. ‘Within six months, with a huge Twitter and Facebook campaign, supported by the likes of Ricky Gervais, we reached 100,000,’ he said. ‘I now go to Parliament weekly to speak and campaign and it’s a fantastic place for animal welfare and to campaign.’ ‘My point is that if you really want to change something in the animal world there are ways and vehicles of doing it,’ he said. Concluding, he said: ‘My main message for the future of the profession is to be kind, caring vets and get out there in the community, as that’s where your clients are.’ ‘I think that it is really important to make sure that every interaction you have with the client is animal welfare-related and to make sure that you shout about it.’
Professional Development Phase Following a black tie ball at Colwick Hall on the Saturday night, students were ready for the second day of congress, which began with a talk on the RCVS’s Professional Development Phase (PDP), the selfassessment system launched in 2009. The need for such a system had first been recognised in 2000, when an education steering group had been set up to look at the process of continued veterinary development, from qualification onwards, explained Julian Wells, an RCVS postgraduate dean. The steering group was particularly concerned about the practical application of the knowledge gained from 160 | Veterinary Record | February 15, 2014
the veterinary degree, but even more so by the lack of support new graduates were receiving in practice. It approached all species sectors under the umbrella of BVA and each suggested skills that should be measurable by the end of a graduate’s first year in practice. Mr Wells noted that the PDP was first launched as a voluntary system, but had since been incorporated into the Code of Professional Conduct and also into the Practice Standards Scheme meaning that, these days, it was more or less compulsory. The purpose of the scheme was to help new graduates keep a record of the cases they had seen and the skills they had used in order to gain a level of competence by the end of their first year in practice. ‘One of the many questions we, as deans, get asked is “how do I know when I am competent?”,’ said Mr Wells. He explained that the PDP system aimed to help graduates answer this question and improve their level of confidence in practice. The system was a web-based record, where graduates could keep an experience log to monitor how many skills they had completed within a particular skill set, as well as to establish where there were gaps in their competence that needed addressing. ‘Don’t forget that this is a major contribution to your CPD obligations in your first year,’ he reminded the students. Explaining how the system worked, he said the RCVS invited graduates to join the database and sent them log in details to access the site. The log set out various skills, divided up by species groups, and it allowed graduates to record skills, such as a routine vaccination or performance of a bitch spay. The point was not to keep record of how many times a particular skill was undertaken, but rather to mark the point at which a graduate felt that they had achieved competence in that area. ‘It doesn’t matter whether you have logged 10 routine vaccines or 500 routine vaccines,’ said Mr
Wells. ‘As soon as you have reached that stage of competence, then you clearly don’t need to add any more of that particular skill.’ Once a graduate believed they had reached a level of competence in all skill areas that they would be using regularly, a senior colleague, who had witnessed their progress, needed to sign off the portfolio. The RCVS did not expect graduates to have gained experience of every skill in every discipline listed on the log and be confident in all of them; rather, it was looking for a range of skills to have been covered in the area of practice in which a graduate would be working and for them to have reached a confidence level of over 90 per cent in the areas they had covered. Mr Wells also highlighted the importance of the notes section, which was designed to be used to indicate the progression from the first time a particular skill was undertaken in practice to the point where the graduate had reached competence in that area. He suggested that half a dozen notes per section would be sufficient to help the deans decide whether the portfolio was ready to be signed off. At the end of the presentation, Peter Harlech Jones, past-president of the BVA, asked Mr Wells what advice he would give to new graduates who struggled to get support from their practice for doing their PDP. Mr Wells replied that many practices were part of the Practice Standards Scheme and, as part of that scheme, it was necessary for practices to demonstrate how they were supporting new graduates. He also said that it was up to the graduate to question practices at interview to determine how they would support PDP.
Surrey vet school
Introducing a talk by Gail Anderson, head of veterinary education at the University of Surrey, Alex McGhee, the newly elected president of the AVS, urged students to keep an open mind and remember that ‘Surrey is happening and so we should engage and work with some of the positives and negatives of that’.
t
The outgoing AVS committee at the congress ball: (front row, from left) Alex Andryszak, Matthew Erskine, Alex McGhee, Jenny Brazier, Helena Diffey, Suzy Hudson-Cooke; (back row, from left) Marcel Hanley, Felicity Barber, Lisa Main, Amy Fitzgerald, Jamie McColl, Jennie McMullan, Gemma Longson, Jon Mayer, Sarah Boland, Georgie Lethbridge, Tom Cantor, Nic Wojciechowski, Tom Bayes, Max Foreman, Craig Fairbairn, Dom Byron Chance, Will Bayton, Eleanor Myerscough, Chris Ogden, Vicky Carliell, Dan Cooper
Downloaded from http://veterinaryrecord.bmj.com/ on June 19, 2015 - Published by group.bmj.com
News & Reports t
Professor Anderson began by telling students why the university wanted a vet school in the first place. Among other things, she said that Surrey was well placed within the medical health and research sector and was keen to expand this to veterinary medicine as well. The new vet school would sit within the human medical sphere at the university, which was already well ranked both nationally and internationally, and the university was keen to be very focused on the idea of One Health. One student asked how many applications Surrey had received for its first intake in October 2014. Professor Anderson replied that 747 applications had been received for 45 places and 300 interviews had been offered. After the first year, the university expected the number of students to rise to around 100, but it needed to start with a small cohort due to the fact that the vet school buildings would not be completed until the end of June 2015; other teaching facilities within the university would be used for the first year. She explained that the course would not be dissimilar in structure to that at Nottingham. There would be a strong emphasis on clinical reasoning and competencies, with the hope that this would lead to an easier transition into practice compared with some of the more traditional
curricula. ‘The other thing that is quite different is that it is very much a global view, rather than just a UK view,’ she said, which would be supportive and encouraging to students who wanted to look into nontraditional areas in veterinary medicine. The vet school would be sited on an in-town campus, without access to a remote campus or teaching hospital. Professor Anderson explained that, to overcome this problem, the university had formed partnerships with the Pirbright Institute and practices such as Westpoint, Fitzpatrick Referrals and Liphook as well as 60 additional practices that would help final-year students complete their intramural rotations. A student asked whether Surrey would be actively encouraging these partner practices to take on students from other vet schools as well. Professor Anderson replied that, yes, it would be, adding ‘the practices are keen to see students from all the different vet schools and, obviously, one of the things they’re doing with EMS is looking at students as potential employees’. She also reassured the students that the big referral practices that Surrey was in partnership with would continue to take students from other vet schools and this was something that the university would be encouraging. Describing how the course would be structured, she said that the first year would be very much focused on the normal,
healthy animal, with a system-by-system approach, working from the cellular level through to the organism as a whole. The second year would focus on discovering the abnormal, incorporating pathology and the concepts of epidemiology and public health. The emphasis in the third year would be returning the animal to normal once a diagnosis had been made. Students would also be required to undertake a research project, culminating in a 10,000-word dissertation, which would be the equivalent of a full BSc research programme. A species-by-species approach to the role of the vet as an educator would be the focus of the fourth year, and students would also have spay and neuter clinics over two semesters. The final year would be dedicated to intramural rotations, but these would be undertaken at the partner practices, rather than at the university itself. ‘What will your methods of assessment be?’ asked one of the students. Professor Anderson replied that these would comprise a mixture of multiple choice questions, practical assessments, online quizzes, peerassessment, objective structured clinical examinations and short answer type exams. She added that students would build up a clinical portfolio over the five years and this would also be assessed. doi: 10.1136/vr.g1418
February 15, 2014 | Veterinary Record | 161
Downloaded from http://veterinaryrecord.bmj.com/ on June 19, 2015 - Published by group.bmj.com
Students look to the future
Veterinary Record 2014 174: 159-161
doi: 10.1136/vr.g1418 Updated information and services can be found at: http://veterinaryrecord.bmj.com/content/174/7/159
These include:
Email alerting service
Receive free email alerts when new articles cite this article. Sign up in the box at the top right corner of the online article.
Notes
To request permissions go to: http://group.bmj.com/group/rights-licensing/permissions To order reprints go to: http://journals.bmj.com/cgi/reprintform To subscribe to BMJ go to: http://group.bmj.com/subscribe/
