This is a topic that I brought up at one of the Dean’s round table discussions here at Davis. It is just an idea but I think it may have some merit. What do you think?
The reasoning is several fold. First when you have been out in practice for 20 years in a small animal clinic, do you think it is safe for you to decide one day to become an equine vet? Legally you could but I argue that you would have to do quite a lot of “brushing up” just to be able to treat horses safely. It seems like quite a big risk to not require someone to take some more classes and/or a species specific test to prove competency in the new species.
A second reason is the board exams themselves. How much information do you have to try to cram for the boards that is nearly irrelevant to your intended species of interest? Having to learn about which parasites are in pigs, what causes equine moon blindness, avian newcastle disease, and declawing in a cat seems like a poor use of time and energy that could be better spent on our species of interest.
This leads right into a third reason which is the length and expense of vet school. Vet school is geared towards clinical competency and the board exams. If you only were expected to know about your species of interest you could cut out at least a year of vet school. If you wanted to add some extra species you could take one extra quarter of classes in that species. This could save students up to 1 year of their life and $20-40,000 in loans. That fails to mention the decreased agitation and stress over learning things that seem irrelevant for the individual.
What I would propose is migrating the DVM degree to five or more categories: small animal, food animal, equine, exotic animal, and wildlife resulting in a SADVM, FADVM, EDVM, EADVM, and WDVM respectively.
This would require a complete restructuring of the way vet school is taught but I think it is the way things should progress. Every year an increasing amount of information is created by research and practice. Instead of trying to make every student and vet responsible for all of it, we should try to only make them responsible for the applicable portions. To steal from the “other” doctors, they have regular general practitioners that only due pediatric, or geriatric, or sports medicine, etc. I know they have a much large population to draw from but they are specifically learning about the portion of the population they will be treating.
I think that currently practicing DVMs should be granted a special waiver to be grandfathered in under their actively practicing field as should current DVM students. However, as soon as schools can figure out how to convert their program to the new format, then they should only take their specialized boards.
Let me know what you think.
Jason
