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1 Veterinary European Transnational Network for Nursing Education and Training NEWSLETTER Dear members and friends of Vetnnet Vetnnet's 15th anniversary we can be proud on it. Continuing growing is encouraging and thanks to all who contributed to success of organization in the past. But every celebration has to be also a view into the future. We have members from 14 countries with different school system, different developed profession but we all have the same goal development and improvement in the field of veterinary nursing education. And because of that I m sure that a fruitful period is before us. Bogdan Zdovc, Vetnnet vice coordinator and editor of the Newsletter Vetnnet conference 2010: veterinary nursing» on the move» This year, the annual Vetnnet Conference will. take place on September 30th, October 1st and 2nd in The Netherlands. Groenhorst College Barneveld will be hosting this conference and is very happy to welcome you! We are planning an event that will help to develop new ideas to train veterinary nurses. Be prepared to gain a whole set of fresh plans, new friends and happy memories. They will help you moving forward! There will be a variety of excellent speakers from the USA, UK, Germany and The Netherlands. Of course we will make sure there will be room for entertaining elements during the conference as well. The Vetnnet Conference Barneveld 2010 Team. 1

2 2 Pepas final conference The Pepas project is proud to invite you to its final conference, which will be held in Norway on Friday September 3rd Pepas has developed a Pan European practical assessment system for veterinary nurses. The system is based on Objective Structured Clinical Exams (OSCE s), and for this system over 100 practical tasks have been developed and published. A pilot of this system has successfully run in 7 countries. Now we are ready to show you our results, and help you to implement our system if you are interested! More information on News from Norwegian School of Veterinary Science (NVH) During the previous year the NVH was very happy to recieve full accreditation status by ACOVENE. The ACOVENE accreditation has helped us to focus strongly on important issues like quality assurance and practical skills training and the accreditation status has now confirmed that we have done a good job. NVH is also a partner in the PEPAS project and is therefore running examiner training sessions this spring, and will be running a pilot OSCE exam in May for the first time. As a direct result of the ACOVENE accreditation and site visit, we were lucky enough to get funding for a practical skills teaching lab. This lab is open for vet and technician students and has been a huge success. It is also now being used for our examiner training and our pilot exam in May. The PEPAS project and resulting pilot exam has also placed a large focus on standardising our practical teaching. This is a work in progress, but after our first examiner training where we had 8 vet technicians attend, their original scepticism for the system was transformed to whole hearted enthusiasm!

3 3 We are now looking forward to renewed enthusiasm for the large amount of work it will be in standardising all our practical teaching, both in our skills lab and in all our active school clinics. In addition we have new ideas for our phsychology teaching in the first semester in order to place an added focus on the Dossier of Competences and the transferability to standardised exams in an osce format. Very exciting and stimulating! Anne E. Torgersen KHK open house day Like every year the Katholieke Hogeschool Kempen held an open house day. This year this took place on the 25th of April. Not only future students, accompanied by relatives, but also alumni came to take a look. Teachers from the whole school were giving information about the curriculum and answering questions. With the idea that this should not only be an informative day, but also a day where people can have some entertainment, students were given the assignment to work around some themes in animal care, Thanks to enthusiasm and creative talent of students it was a real success. A whole jungle room full of reptiles and fish where students explained how to take care was a real success! Brave visitors even got the opportunity to hold a bird spider. Grasshoppers worked with vegetables were offered. A lot off curious visitors tasted and confirmed it tasted delicious. Rodents were exposed, students explained how to handle and restrain, how to take care, Visitors learned something about First aid in dog and cats, could gain some dietary advice while receiving samples.

4 4 And as it was a sunny afternoon goat ice was sold to support a project this summer our students will start in Uganda. Life demonstrations were taken care of by a lot of enthusiastic dog owners. Not only flyball and mushing but even doggy dance had a lot of spectators. This year it was the first time students actually took care of some animation on our open day. We are convinced they have done a very good job! Inneke Blom The value of experience «in situ». Lacking the historic force of the German system, the preferred way of becoming a graduated veterinary nurse in France has been the «sandwich course» that is currently carried on exclusively by the GIPSA. The precision of helping during operations, understanding pharmaceutical legislation or the quality of client relationships have all required time to be spent «on the job» (in the form of an apprenticeship or lengthy courses). Training has to be practical as well as theoretical. «To care for animals» is the dream of all young people who are guided by GIPSA in its important educational role: to embark upon a study course, recent experience in a veterinary practice is required typically at least a one or two weeks period. This requirement of the veterinary profession is not found in other trades for example, a secretary is not required to spend a week working as a secretary before starting a training course. As a result of this obligatory period of pre-course

5 training, colleges have been able to minimize their «dropout rate». When young people start a sandwich course, they go through with it. This is the ideal, because it avoids numerous changes of direction. Now let us come back to our future veterinary nurse. Once they know what they want to do, the job is explained to them at a meeting with other students and they undergo psychological evaluation and interviews. Once the candidates have been selected, they join a «pool» of candidates soon to be an «online» pool which veterinary practices will be able to consult. As for young sandwich course students, are they better than the rest? They are ready to work in a veterinary practice and are already familiar with it. It is important to point out that sandwich course students obtain better examination results than students who have no practical experience. This is the value of «on the job» experience. GIPSA 5 Groenhorst College Barneveld, the Netherlands New Veterinary nurse trainings centre Groenhorst College Barneveld is building a trainings centre to educate our veterinary nurse s students. The centre will look like a real veterinary practice, with all the equipment you can find in a practice. For example: digital radiology, a laboratory, computers, anaesthesia equipment, medical instruments etcetera. The practice is specially built to educate the students; the rooms are large enough to teach 25 students. In the centre there will be a waiting room with a large desk. In this room students can practice there communication skills. They learn how to inform the owners about their animals and how to answer the phone correctly. Also there is a possibility to organize puppy parties or other events to inform the owners.

6 In the centre there is also a big consulting room. The students can practice all the skills they need during the consultations, like handling the animals, drawing blood and giving injections. Also there is an operating room. In this room the students are able to practice how to prepare an animal for surgery. Placing an i.v. - drip, administer the anaesthesia and shave the animal. And monitoring the animal during the surgery. Taking care of the animal after, do the physical exams, administer drugs. In this training centre the students can practice all the practical skills they need as a veterinary nurse. Also they can apply their knowledge in this veterinary practice, and they learn how to be a veterinary nurse with a professional attitude. With great pleasure we like to show you the trainings centre/ veterinary practice at the Vetnnet- conference in October of this year in Barneveld, the Netherlands! Leonieke Balkenende 6 New BSc (Veterinary Nursing) honours degree programme available in UCD for 2009 Entry UCD is pleased to announce the introduction of a four year full time Bachelor of Science (Veterinary Nursing) degree programme. This is the first Level 8 Veterinary Nursing programme in Ireland and is similar to recent developments in UK universities such as Bristol and London. The new honours degree programme will have an average intake of 44 students each year and is designed to provide graduates with the academic foundation and practical skills and competencies with which to build a solid career as a veterinary nurse. Stages one and two will take place on the university campus with students undertaking high quality modules delivered through lectures, tutorials and practical classes, covering all aspects of veterinary nursing. In stages three and four, students will engage in taught modules and work placements within veterinary practices that are committed to veterinary nurse training. Other Veterinary Nursing initiatives in UCD UCD recently hosted a PEPAS examiner training event as a partner in this European initiative to develop an OSCE style examination for the assessment of

7 7 practical skills of veterinary nurses. The training provided by Vicky, Julie and Libby from the RCVS proved both intensive and enjoyable and we are delighted to report that there were now 3 Dutch and 8 Irish newly-qualified OSCE examiners produced! Andrea Dwane Meeting for Higher Education VN course providers The Royal Veterinary College was the venue on Saturday 13 th Feb 2010 for the first subject centre meeting for Higher Education VN course providers kindly sponsored by the Higher Education Academy subject centre; Medicine, Dentistry and Veterinary (MEDEV) A number of representatives from different colleges attended the day to explore various issues facing universities delivering veterinary nursing degrees. The first session covered student selection and retention. Academic entry requirements are similar amongst the various colleges and so the discussion focused on what additional attributes are we looking for in recruiting a student for a professional course. The format of the interview often included some practical task or using clinical props to initiate discussion. One of the issues that appeared to affect the majority of the course providers was the student leaving to take up paid employment in the practice in which they were on placement. The next session covered work based assessment, especially the changes occurring with the disappearance of the NVQ portfolio and the introduction of an electronic skills recording system. There was a general consensus that Higher Education (HE) students should be reflecting on their skill attainment by the use of reflective case studies. There have already been some very good examples of this seen by the RVC students. The afternoon session looked at the assessment challenges in designing a course which is valid, reliable and defensible! Methods of standard setting were discussed and the different ways it is carried out in the different institutions. The final sessions focused on attempting to finalise the HE benchmarks for veterinary nursing. It is hoped that this will be sent for validation once the current National Occupational

8 Standards and RCVS VN award has been finalised. Further information on this day will be available on the MEDEV website. My thanks go to Sophie Pullen, Lecturer in Veterinary Nursing who co-facilitated this day with me and also to Gillian Brown from MEDEV who helped me get this project off the ground. I hope that this leads to many more meetings where the HE course providers can share good practice. 8 Hilary Orpet Amiedu goes online. In Amiedu the majority of students are apprenticeship training students. Our students work in clinics in different parts of Finland. Some of the students have up to 900 km to our school. This is one reason, among many, why we started to develop our virtual learning environment. An internet course is flexible regardless to location or schedule. Every class have their own home page where they will find general information about their study program/ curriculum and the latest news from their educator, study plan etc. The biggest challenge with this program has been to develop courses for the different subjects. This has also been a very time consuming process. We started by listing the subjects we wanted to offer as virtual courses and then we begun to plan each course separately. For example we chose to develop a course about all the legislations that concerns vet nursing (Picture 1). We find this a dull subject to lecture traditionally. Feedback from our students shows that the virtual course has made the subject much more interesting. For example a part of the course is a section where you can test your own knowledge about the different legislations. The test corrects itself immediately and the student will have the result right away. After this test the students participate in setting their goals for the course and taking part in the decision making process makes them quite motivated. In the third and the

9 most essential part of this course, the students have to answer the teacher s questions concerning several laws, and after doing that the students have became familiar with different types of legislations texts. When planning our virtual courses we emphasise the role of discussion, networking between the students and peer review. We have also been making video clips to make the learning more interesting. For example in our preoperative course we have filmed different situations from the operating theatre and after the film the students discuss the situations in groups (Picture 2). The preoperative course also includes several normal days at school, so virtual learning and schooldays can make a workable combination. We also use a lot of virtual group working tools for example in the end of the preoperative course the students do a case study together. For the virtual courses to be successful the course has to be planned carefully. Here the pedagogy & virtual learning courses that our staff has been able to attend has turned out to be very useful. Harriet Sandfors, Päivi Ylikorpi 9 Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences New practicing rooms at SLU, Skara, Sweden In December, we opened our new practicing rooms in new facilities. The old farm building on the SLU Campus in Skara used to host a large dairy herd until 2003.

10 During 2009 the building was transformed into tailor-made, well adapted facilities for our students. The first floor of part of the building now houses one operation theatre with facilities for sterile scrubbing up and anesthesia, one room for policlinical work, one dissection room, two seminar rooms, washing up /instrument room with washing machine and autoclave, storage room and dressing room. We now have excellent facilities for all sorts of training sessions. Yet to come is a mock X-ray machine, to train exposure technique. For training, we use replicas (mannequins), toy dogs and live dogs (and sometimes cats), belonging to the students and the teachers. At present we take on 40 students a year, but presumably, we will take on 80 a year from Fortunately, the new facilities are sufficient for that number of student as well as the 40 we have today. 10 Maria Tivemo Eftring BIOTEHNIŠKI IZOBRAŢEVALNI CENTER LJUBLJANA Do it yourself model of the dog for intubation Short recipe Ingredients: toy dog, piece of plastic tube, Hill s model of the mouth, plastic bottle, cloth tongue, glue Procedure: 1. Glue the model of the mouth into the mouth cavity of the model dog. 2. Cut one end of the plastic tube into the shape of epiglottis. 3. Warm the same end of the tube up and bend it to

11 appropriate epiglottis shape. 4. Glue epiglottis shape end of the plastic tube to tongue. 5. Glue other end of the plastic tube to the plastic bottle (artificial lungs). 6. Put everything into the toy dog. 11 Tine Eleršek It s A First! A Warwickshire College veterinary nursing student, Stephanie Hedges, has achieved a First Class Honours degree in Veterinary Nursing. Exciting news in itself, but Stephanie however, is the first student ever at Warwickshire College to have achieved this accolade by distance learning. Stephanie combined her four-year degree course with a veterinary nursing job at Abington Park Veterinary Surgery in Northampton. The surgery handles complex referrals from other veterinary practices in the area. She now works one night a week at Vets Now, an emergency veterinary service, and since September 2009 Stephanie has worked part-time at Warwickshire College teaching Companion Animal Behaviour and Therapy for the BSc (Hons) course. Throughout her busy schedule, Stephanie has also continued to run her own business as a Canine Behaviour Counsellor which, in human terms, is akin to a child psychologist.

12 Stephanie said: Juggling work and study has become second nature to me now. It has been hard work, but I am delighted with the outcome. I have recently been accepted as a full member of the Association of Pet Behaviour Counsellors which is a very prestigious organisation that only has 70 full members and I think it will certainly help in my freelance role as a canine behaviour counsellor. 12 Nicki Johnson New Vetnnet website And as the last news: we are working hard to create the new Vetnnet website and here you can see the proposal of the first page. Bogdan Zdovc