ENHANCED EDUCATION IN RURAL FOOD ANIMAL PRACTICE DEDICATED TRAINING FOR VETERINARY STUDENTS AND EXPOSURE FOR NATIVE AMERICAN YOUTH

Food animal veterinarians are critical in maintaining the health and welfare of food animals, ensuring a safe and ample food supply, safeguarding public health, protecting global food security, and supporting the U.S. economy. For Native Americans, food animals have an additional cultural and spiritual component. Yet, there is a severe shortage of veterinarians that serve reservations, with veterinarians who provide services to food animals essentially non-existent. For example, the Navajo Nation, the largest land area held by a native American tribe in the United States comprising 16 million acres and approximately the size of the state of west Virginia has only one veterinarian that serves the entire community and primary domestic animals.Multiple factors, including the low enrollment of Native American students in veterinary schools, explain the lack of veterinarians on reservations. The lack of exposure of reservation youth to career opportunities in the veterinary medicine field partly explains the limited enrollment of Native American students in the profession.The deficiency of veterinarians in Native American reservations greatly impacts the health and welfare of animals, especially food animals. While the shortage of food animal veterinarians is a multifactorial problem, there is an attainable opportunity to help resolve this problem by targeting children from underserved areas and exposing them to veterinary practice in a bid to have more students choosing veterinary medicine as a career. In addition, a curriculum-based approach will also help students who are already enrolled in veterinary school.To help alleviate the problem of shortage of food animal veterinarians in underserved areas, the Midwestern University (MWU) farm animal faculty, and the College of Veterinary Medicine (CVM) aim to enhance the existing infrastructure of their food animal program by establishing an exclusive educational opportunity for veterinary students--a competitive externship in food animal practice that involves veterinary students nationwide and youths from Navajo Nation. This program's objectives will be to provide veterinary students with hands-on practical rural food animal practice experiences and veterinary and business management training and to exposure Native American youths to opportunities in veterinary medicine. This will be accomplished by establishing an intensive 2-week externship entitled Enhanced Education in Food Animal Rural Practice. This specialized program is specifically designed to meet the deficiencies identified in veterinary curricula and training as well as to expose the Native American youths to career opportunities veterinary medicine. By providing a focus on practice in rural or underserved areas, the program addresses work environments that frequently lack support and guidance for a new graduate.Collectively, the program described in this proposal will provide comprehensive training to prepare students for a career in rural practice that food animal-focused students might otherwise not have been exposed to during their clinical rotations on campus or in most private practice settings. By providing this unique training opportunity, MWU is ensuring that the veterinary workforce is trained to meet the demands of the profession, which serves the long-term goal of this program to recruit veterinarian students including Native Americans into food animal or mixed practice and support the retention of veterinarians in the underserved communities. Using a collaborative approach between the project director and collaborative stakeholders to plan, implement, and evaluate the project goals will ensure the project's objective is achievable.Program Objective: 1) To provide veterinary students with hands-on practical rural food animal practice experiences and veterinary and business management training and 2) to exposure Native American youth to opportunities in veterinary medicine. To accomplish these objectives, and through the following three aims, this program will provide on-site instruction and interactive discussions that foster the skills needed for food animal veterinarians to have successful careers in rural food animal practice by specifically addressing unique challenges to this sector of the profession.Specific Aim 1--Rural Food Animal Veterinary Practice: To establish entry-level competency and confidence needed for new veterinary graduates to become successful practitioners in rural areas while providing the needed care to food animals and education to support improved animal and public health in underserved communities.Specific Aim 2--Navajo Youths Participation: To expose the youth on the reservation to the practice of veterinary medicine and encourage them to consider careers as veterinarians.Specific Aim 3--Food Animal Practice Analysis: Identification of root causes and strategy development that recognizes the changing landscape of food animal practice in the United States.