Vet Rotations... Is this normal?

[velocicaur]

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I have a family member who is a 3rd/4th year vet student. She started her rotations around Christmas and has been cycling through them since. I talk with them frequently and I am just disappointed in the education system. On certain rotations, the group of students she is with may see 1-2 cases a day per student. There have been times, especially in radiology, where they had NOTHING to do for the whole day. They had a few tests for radiology, most of the students failed these tests because they literally had no idea what is going on... because they do not get any experience in it. Though it didn't seem to matter, they just moved on to their next rotation.

It must be said that most of these rotations have been at the college themselves. The school claims that it has been "slow," but there has to be something for the students to do to learn useful skills/practices.

This is at a large state school with a very good reputation.

I have to say, and I think they would admit it too, that the learning process has been minimal thus far. Now I know they have a year left of rotations to do and there will (hopefully) be a lot of learning opportunities to be had, but it is scary that they will be able to practice in just over a year. It's not the person, the training just seems... terrible compared to what human medical students go through.

Is this normal? How were your rotations?

 

[WhtsThFrequency]

That sounds like a caseload problem. Of course some services are slower than others, but seeing only 1-2 patients a day (or nothing) for rotation after rotation after rotation seems highly unusual to me. In our radiology service, for example, we usually had at least 8 per day with multiple views, often twice that, another half dozen for ultrasound and we were a smaller state school). Surgery and internal medicine were insanely busy. Clinical year is absolute balls to the wall and what she is describing sounds off to me

Actually, our training is in many cases more hand-on (especially surgically) than what medical students get to do because, like you said, we need to be able to practice right out of the gate.

 

[Minnerbelle]

Agreed that this sounds like a caseload problem. I was running around crazy busy for 12-16 hours a day on many a rotations. No time to eat lunch on most days. The odd rotations with low caseload were actually a relief! Though I specifically looked for opportunities to allow me this (didn't take much effort though), I graduated with at least 70 solo surgeries under my belt. These included the usual spay/neuter but also surgical dental extraction, cherry eye surgery, cystotomy, exlap with intestinal resection & anastomosis, hernia repair, and abdominal cryptorchid surgery. All of these were on real patients. Really wanted to have an FHO, enucleation, and amputation too, but I was never at the right place at the right time. Only got to enucleate dead things...

I would say that I on average saw about 4 patients per day, some being in patients and others being outpatients. I dunno how many patients md students see daily, but 2 inpatients and 2 appts is a tooon of work. It meant I would spend about 30 min-1 hr per record for the outpatient appts the night before to review. I would go in at like 6 am to feed/clean/walk the inpatients, run some bloodwork, read records if new patient admitted through the ER, come up with treatment sheet and calculate drug dosages, write scripts, perform treatments, then round. After rounds, owners need to be called, new diagnostic requests have to be made, and the patient may or may not need to be shuttled around the hospital for testing/procedures. Then the appointments come in, and each appt can take 2-3 hours from when they walk in to when they leave while you run around like a chicken with its head cut off. Long personalized discharge notes have to be written for all patients (like seriously I have never gotten such a courtesy from any doctor no matter how serious a condition I had). Throughout the day, the inpatients need to be checked and things modified. Any inpatients getting discharged need a ton of stuff done before they can leave, and the discharge itself is a process. Then we round, and owners need to be called for an update. By the time this is all said and done, it is easily 6-7pm. Then you get caught up on paperwork and then there are charts to be read for the next day... But the owner asked you to give their pet a kiss goodnight, so you go back into the wards to do that and find out it chewed out its iv catheter... Then you go home because you need to look up x,y, and z.

Friends in the md world have been pretty astonished by the amount of things we do in vet school in general, so I'm not sure if your family member is in a particularly bad situation or if it's a perception issue. But I have to say, you can learn a ton from a limited number of cases if you make up your mind to extract the most from each case and become an active participant rather than just sit back and be a vet student minion. There were rotations where the caseload was so high that I was so busy with all the scut work I didn't have the time or mental capacity to learn effectively.

 

[bunnity]

My experience was about the same as Minnerbelle's: running around like a crazy person trying to get all patients taken care of. Maybe the OP's school should send CSU and Penn some students to even things out!

For comparison, our SA radiology would see 15+ ultrasounds, several CT and MRI's, and I don't even know how many radiographs (30? 50?) every day. As students we rotated through helping with radiographs and ultrasounds and in the "reading room" plus we had rounds every day and a host of learning radiographs to get through. And it is generally considered a nice chill rotation.

 

[lei325]

Agree with everyone above; caseloads vary. On rotations I had a really variable experience. Some days I was in the hospital for 16 hours doing things the whole time, other times I was sitting around reading up on cases. Part of the experience is discussing cases with fellow students and getting learning opportunities that way. No school is perfect! Rotations is definitely what you make of it.

 

[MassDVMMPH]

I agree - I was insanely busy on most rotations, especially internal medicine and surgery, but anesthesiology, ICU, and radiology were also quite busy. My only slow rotation was small animal repro - I honestly think we had 4 patients during the entire 2 weeks, but our prof was involved with swine research as well so we ended up helping him with that - chasing after piglets was an incredibly fun respite from my typical 4th year rotation.

 

[david594]

Radiology was generally a pretty consistent rotation for us. We always had a constant flow of pre-surgical orthopedic rads to keep us busy. The places we had issues was usually for abdominal radiographs as they were pretty rare as most got ultrasounds. The slow days on the rotations we had a huge bank of teaching files that we could go through at our own pace.

If everyone "literally had no idea what is going on" that sounds like a failure of the program.