A Call for Compassionate Empathy: Analysis of Verbal Empathic Communication between Veterinary Students and Veterinary Clients and their Dogs.

In human medicine, empathy contributes to enhanced patient satisfaction and trust, decreased litigation, and increased adherence to medical recommendations. Understanding client perspectives is crucial in the empathic process; failure to explore these perspectives has been linked to decreased client satisfaction in veterinary consultations. This article explores how veterinary clients verbally expressed emotional concerns during consultations and how veterinary students addressed them.

Multiple-Choice Questions in Small Animal Medicine: An Analysis of Cognitive Level and Structural Reliability, and the Impact of these Characteristics on Student Performance.

Students entering the final year of the veterinary curriculum need to integrate information and problem solve. Assessments used to document competency prior to entry to the clinical environment should ideally provide a reliable measurement of these essential skills. In this study, five internal medicine specialists evaluated the cognitive grade (CG) and structural integrity of 100 multiple-choice questions (MCQs) used to assess learning by third-year students at a United States (US) veterinary school.

Views of professionalism: a veterinary institutional perspective.

In many western countries, there has been a marked change in the demographic profile of those entering the veterinary profession, with a shift from a predominantly male to a predominantly female intake. There have been parallel changes in society, with greater emphasis on human rights and work-life balance. It is, therefore, timely to consider what constitutes correct professional conduct for the profession, as there is the potential for problems to arise over the interpretation of 'professionalism' due to cultural and generational differences.

Approaches to defining day-one competency: a framework for learning veterinary skills.

Competency at graduation, in a variety of physical and attitudinal skills, is an essential outcome measure for courses training veterinary surgeons. The approach adopted by the Royal Veterinary College, London, to identify and define the expected skill competencies required of our veterinary undergraduates by the time of graduation is described. In addition, we demonstrate how this skill set was built into a framework that was aligned with other student learning objectives.