Abstract
Background: The new School of Veterinary Medicine at Surrey uses a distributed model where the final year of clinical placements will take place within partner practices not within a teaching hospital. Our school thus needs significant collaboration with the veterinary profession as our training partners. We wished to see early on how closely aligned the perceptions of how best to achieve this aligned between partner practitioners and our faculty. Summary of Work: We surveyed our partners and our faculty to assess their perceptions of what skills, knowledge and attributes (SKAs) a successful new veterinary graduate would have and how they would support the students to achieve these SKAs. Using "Poll everywhere" to develop word clouds and concept mapping, we compared the results between the two groups in their perceptions of the required SKAs for new graduate success. Summary of Results: Both surveyed groups strongly agreed that the most important skill to success is “communication”. Differences in perceptions of the importance of “business / management skills training” appeared between groups with the staff failing to mention these skills despite both words appearing in the practitioner list. Health and wellness knowledge areas were missing from the practitioner group. Discussion and Conclusions: Overall, the alignment between practitioners and academics perceptions was strong with some interesting gaps in knowledge domains but not so much in domains relating to skills or attributes. Take-home messages: This study provides very useful information for us as we develop the new school to assure better alignment of expectations between us as veterinary academics and our practice partners in training our new graduates. We must as well acknowledge the limitations of any curriculum to deliver attribute training without support from both academic and clinical trainers role modelling these.