02/22/2024
Hi everyone! It’s great to see you all thriving out in practice/further training.
I have a huge favor to ask: Back over here at CSU, we are restructuring the fourth-year diagnostic medicine/postmortem rotation to better suit training goals for future veterinarians. I think there are some definite pitfalls in our current state. My biggest concern is that the rotation turns into a “necropsy” practicum for many students with way too much emphasis on how well you can perform a necropsy/put together a morphologic diagnosis, which in my opinion, should not be the goal, as that is our job in the end. 95ish% of students do not see themselves in a pathology career, however, practicing our best medicine requires collaboration/dabbling in both sides. I think a main goal of the practicum should be how we can make this collaboration most efficacious, so who better to ask than some fresh veterinarians who have semi-recently experienced the fourth-year training?
To distill/guide the feedback, I think it may be best to think about the goals of the rotation in three main categories.
Practical application: How you will work/are working with pathologists in practice (i.e. did you wish you learned more about sample selection, sample processing/biopsy submission, the review process, how we determine special stains/IHC choices etc., how to interpret our reports, etc.)
Knowledge: Did you wish you had spent more time on pathogeneses, etiologies, prognoses, etc. of various clinical presentations? Cytology interpretation? Basic histology?
Technique: Necropsy technique, field techniques, cytology technique, biopsy technique (would be from our surgeons).
Or pretty much anything else you would like to add, even if something was just poorly organized, etc.
I, the diagnostic laboratory, and future classes would tremendously appreciate just a little of your time to help facilitate the improvement. As much or as little as you can provide!
Chase
