Students – Make Sure You’re Ready for “Day-1” as a Swine Vet

September 27, 2022 — 

Welcome back to school! We're excited to welcome new and returning student members to AASV! After you've had a chance to review the great benefits available to AASV student members, make sure you're on track to have the knowledge and skills needed to hit the ground running on day 1 of your career as a swine veterinarian or food animal practitioner.

Check yourself against the list of basic, intermediate, and advanced Day-1 competencies available at https://umnswinenews.com/day-1-competencies-for-swine-interested-veterinary-graduates/.

Project Background:

The American Association of Swine Veterinarians (AASV) Foundation funded a project led by the University of Minnesota-College of Veterinary Medicine to develop day-1 competencies for swine veterinary practice. A task force of swine faculty led by Dr. Perle Zhitnitskiy created a provisional list of competencies for students and sent it to practitioners and swine faculty across the US. These experts ranked the competencies based on three levels of importance: basic, intermediate and advanced. The ranked list was then mapped to the Competency Based Veterinary Education framework created by the Association of American Veterinary Medical Colleges (AAVMC) and checked for exhaustiveness. Swine-oriented competencies (109) were organized into nine domains: pig handling, swine husbandry, sample collection, record keeping and result interpretation, clinical reasoning, treatment and prevention, biosecurity, communication, and regulatory. The final list of competencies was created as an online, interactive tool accessible by all at z.umn.edu/SwineCompetencies.

To access the report with detailed findings please visit the AASV Foundation-funded Research page, or view the report directly.