This week we're going to focus on clinical skills. And we're all part of the clinical skills teaching team here at the The Royal (Dick) Vet in Edinburgh. My name's Catriona Bell and I'm a vet, and I'm a senior lecturer. >> My name's Caroline Mosley, I'm a registered veterinary nurse. >> And my name's Neil Hudson and I'm a veterinarian surgeon, and I'm a senior lecturer here too. And we all teach on the clinical skills course. And as you can see, the focus of this week is going to be the clinical exam and the clinical skill side of things, focusing in on the dogs. So you're going to be seeing a lot more of Juno and Seal in due course. Enjoy the week. >> This week, we'll be introducing the concept of clinical skills stage. And we'll explain more about them in a moment. But before we start, we just want you to consider this question. How many of the 5 senses does a veterinary surgeon use to carry out their role successfully? Do they use sight, smell, touch, hearing and taste? Take a moment to think about this, and we'll come back to you with the answer in a second. So hopefully you reached the conclusion that a veterinary surgeon uses four of their senses on a daily basis, with the one exception being taste, unless something's gone wrong. So in terms of sight, we use our observation skills with every patient, both from a distance, and close up. And that can give us a huge amount of important information about a case. We'll be working on these skills, particularly with you, over the next week. We also use our sense of smell with every patient. For example, when we examine a dog's ears, we check whether there are any abnormal smells which could indicate the presence of an infection for example. The term we use for touching and assessing a structure with our fingers or our hands, is palpation. And this can be extremely useful for detecting enlarged structures such as mammary tumors, or detecting inflamed structures such as swollen joints. In a similar way, we also use the term auscultation to describe the skills of listening to sounds which are emanating from the patient. And we can do this either directly using our ears, for example, to listen for coughing or sneezing. Or indirectly using a stethoscope to magnify the internal sounds such as heart or respiratory sounds. As we've said, this week we'll be introducing the concept of clinical skills to you. And these are core practical skills that every veterinary surgeon needs to master to successfully carry out their role. Any new skill, whether you're driving a car, baking a cake, or measuring a pulse rate, requires repeated practice to become competent at it. So for this reason, we intentionally start our clinical skills training with first year students. And we focus initially on observation, palpation, and auscultation skills. We also emphasize the fact that they need to practice their skills in order to become proficient at them. Our aim this week is to give you a flavor of the clinical skills training that our first year veterinary students receive. However, with the online format of a MOOC, it's obviously difficult to cover a number of the skills that we teach. So we're going to focus particularly on developing your observation and associated clinical skills. Therefore by the end of this week, we hope we will have introduced you to three clinical skills. Firstly, describing the signalment of an animal. Secondly, observing an animal carefully to gather as much information as possible. And thirdly, accurately measuring a respiratory rate, and comparing this to normal reference ranges. Most of the MOOC content this week will focus on dogs, as this is the species that our students start to examine before they then move on to apply the same skills to horses and cattle.
