The setting up of veterinary schools is a growth industry around the world. Presently there is another new school in the final stages of establishing itself in the United Kingdom – the School of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Surrey in Guildford. The Dean of the College of Veterinary Medicine and Life Sciences at CityU, Professor Michael Reichel, visited with Prof Peter D Cockcroft, the Head of Veterinary Education within the School of Veterinary Medicine, to share their knowledge and experiences.

The school offers a five year veterinary degree, as is customary in the UK, and is about to graduate its first class of about 45 in 2019. A final accreditation visit by the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons (RCVS), the regulatory body responsible for veterinary registration in the UK, is scheduled for February 2019.

The university runs a distributed clinical teaching model, providing no in-house clinical teaching and relies on the outsourcing of its clinical years to 70 veterinary practices around the region. The practice veterinarians have undergone a weeklong clinical teaching training and are assessing the learning outcomes against strict criteria set by the university. Assuring quality and similar experiences across the 70 practices will remain a challenge though, and the final accreditation visit will be expected with some trepidation.

Prof. Reichel says that, even though their approaches are quite different, it was helpful and interesting to compare notes with another establishing veterinary school.