You’ve probably heard that we are pioneering yet another change in postgraduate education with our new vet courses. The new online Small Animal Medicine Certificate and Soft Tissue Surgery Certificate programmes aren’t just designed to teach the clinical knowledge vets need to succeed, but to support their professional wellbeing and career. To do this, we looked further than the world of vet med, and took lessons from some of the world’s most respected professions. In this article, we’re going to reveal details about what we’ve borrowed – and how! - and give you an insight into the fascinating process of postgraduate education.
We looked at some of the hardest parts of veterinary medicine – like decision making under pressure, prioritisation, dealing with mistakes, and communication – and then looked at other professions who need to cope with these. And what we found was that these are skills that are trained and learned, not born into. All of these professions have training courses that help people deal with their difficult jobs.
So, we looked at the features of these training programmes, and worked out what we could borrow, and how. We spoke to pilots, air-traffic controllers, NASA, firefighters, and emergency room doctors to find out what – and how – they learned. Then we started taking these lessons and transforming them for our own profession.
Every professional, in every profession, has made a mistake. “To err is human” after all. And, while mistakes in veterinary medicine can feel like whoppers, they’re nothing to mistakes made by NASA engineers or firefighters or air traffic controllers, where mistakes can cost human lives – sometimes hundreds of them. We looked at how these professions train to expect and accept mistakes, and how they learn from them. Now, our flagship courses contain Error Management Training activities – vets are provided with ambiguous clinical scenarios, and the inevitable mistakes are deconstructed and reflected on.
Another activity in our new vet courses involves taking a diagnosis and working backwards through the steps that led to it. This technique comes from elite engineering teams, who have to debug code or find the reason for system failure. While the vets are working backwards, mistake-making becomes normalised, and they learn how decisions are actually made – not how they’d be made in a theoretical, perfect world. Patterns become obvious, biases are analysed, and the most important decision-making data is revealed.
Communication is one of the most important parts of veterinary medicine. We looked at how elite teams like New York firefighters communicate strategically, and built activities that practise this. Delegates on our new programmes are taught to explain, defend, and adapt their decisions for different audiences, through structured communications activities.
A busy vet practice with multiple cases needing attention is pretty similar to an air traffic control tower. Like air traffic controllers, vets have to make quick decisions, with imperfect evidence, that could impact lives. We took prioritisation techniques and decision-making models that these air traffic controllers use daily, and repurposed them for our courses, helping us to train vets who are calm, confident, and capable under pressure.
Veterinary medicine is hard - there’s no doubt about it. Stress and burnout are high, retention is an ongoing problem, and every day, vets struggle with communicating complex medical problems in a way our colleagues and clients understand.
Postgraduate education shouldn’t just be about acquiring technical knowledge, but about becoming a better all-round clinician. We want our alumni to be powerful, confident decision makers, who can approach difficult cases with a critical eye, and have a wealth of techniques to help them deal with the pressures of everyday veterinary practice.
Veterinary medicine is a uniquely demanding profession in many ways, but it shares a lot of aspects with other high-stakes professions, and we’ve capitalised on that in our new vet courses. By training our delegates to react calmly, communicate effectively, and learn from every mistake, we’re helping vets be confident and resilient for a bright professional future.
If you want to learn to think like some of the world's best, try our new veterinary certificate courses: