Originally from: Mike Meredith
                        
Coleen wrote..

that Vets are any worse or better – then they have ever been. Perhaps the
reasons for becoming a Vet has become more money orientated

Having spent 20 years teaching vets, up to 1996, I can tell you that veterinary students rarely, if ever, become vets solely or mainly to make money. The great majority of them are highly motivated, when they enter veterinary education, towards promoting the health and welfare of animals. My own experience (confirmed by an independent research project published in the Veterinary Record about 5 years ago) is that vet student attitudes and high ideals towards animals have a tendency (not in all cases of course) to deteriorate during the course of their training. Many of us are aware of the factors that probably lead to this, and some of us have worked hard to try and change them. One of the obstacles is that most people doing the training of veterinary students and making the educational decisions in veterinary schools are NOT vets themselves, and of those few who are vets, some have never worked in veterinary practice.

Some of us, despite being long-dedicated, have quit veterinary teaching in recent years because we could not bear any longer to be part a training system which we felt was increasingly out of touch with the evolving needs and standards of the animal-owning public.

Condemnation, both inside and outside the profession, of the conduct of the RCVS during the foot and mouth epidemic reflects this, as also does Coleen when she says...

What I think is happening, is that some of us ,
their clients are getting wiser and not so easily or ready to go away
without asking questions. We have a right to ask – and be told!

Coleen is reflecting here the rise of what has been called "Postmodernism"...

see "Decision-Making Behaviour in Human and Animal Health" http://www.lovehealth.org/tools/decisions.htm

Like everyone holding responsible positions in society these days, vets face an overwhelming burden of escalating public standards, rapid technical advances, massive government (local and national) bureaucracy and a legal and financial morass around the whole area of running any kind of business or service.

Faced with these demands, they need training and post-graduation support which is as simple, efficient and highly focussed as possible. Veterinary students are overwhelmed with a mass of scientific knowledge and technical procedures to MEMORISE – much of which is quickly forgotten, much of which was never relevant in the first place and much of which rapidly becomes out of date.

I believe that there would be advantage in weeding out a lot of the "dead wood" in veterinary education, and replacing it with more training in flexible and transferable (i.e. from a familiar situation to a new one) professional skills, including communication skills and that stuff that has long been out of fashion, once called "character building", but now called personal development (ethics, integrity, honesty etc).

Mike