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Public-Health Training for Veterinarians |
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ABSTRACT |
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 TOP ABSTRACT BACKGROUNDCPCVM ACTIVITIESPUBLIC/CORPORATE TRACK GRADUATE...DISCUSSION AND FUTURE DIRECTIONSREFERENCES |
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Key Words: veterinary medical education • public practice • corporate practice • Virginia • Maryland
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BACKGROUND |
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TOPABSTRACTBACKGROUNDCPCVM ACTIVITIESPUBLIC/CORPORATE TRACK GRADUATE...DISCUSSION AND FUTURE DIRECTIONSREFERENCES |
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The CPCVM is a nationally recognized center of excellence that trains veterinary students and graduate veterinarians for career opportunities in public and corporate veterinary medicine, encompassing all areas of veterinary medicine other than private fee-for-service clinical practice.1 Examples of public and corporate activities within the veterinary profession include working for federal, state, and local government agencies, such as departments of agriculture and health; conducting biomedical research; working in biotechnology; formulating public policy; practicing zoological, wildlife, or laboratory-animal medicine; working for a non-governmental organization; working in academia; and working for the pet-food or pharmaceutical industries.
The current mission statement for the CPCVM is to produce veterinarians with the necessary skills and knowledge to be outstanding scientists and leaders in the public and corporate sectors through the advancement of health, medicine, agriculture and the veterinary profession, and this mission still reflects the original intentions for the center. The CPCVM was established following the publication in 1989 of the Pew Report, among whose key findings were that there were serious shortages in many public-sector specialties and that veterinary colleges were not adequately training veterinarians for public practice. Colleges were urged to form centers of excellence in which unique advantages of those colleges would be maximized to excel in a specific area of veterinary education. Given the University of Maryland's proximity to the nation's capital, which is home to the greatest concentration of public-sector veterinarians in the United States, the CPCVM's original name was Center for Government and Corporate Veterinary Medicine. The goals of the center were to develop a flexible and diversified educational program within the professional veterinary curriculum that would provide graduates with enhanced entry-level skills to compete successfully for career opportunities in the government and corporate sectors of veterinary medicine; to create a new post-veterinary graduate program at the master's or doctoral level that would permit courses of study that suit individual as well as organizational needs; and to establish a flexible program of continuing education for veterinarians desiring advanced training or career redirection without the necessity of leaving their current employment during training.1
The activities of the CPCVM are currently conducted by three full-time faculty members who have a broad range of public and corporate backgrounds, including regulatory medicine, public health, zoological and wildlife medicine, and epidemiology. In addition, a part-time faculty member implements the activities prescribed by a cooperative agreement with the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS). There is also a robust collection of adjunct faculty and partners who lecture in undergraduate and veterinary courses and in the continuing-education offerings, as well as mentoring and providing experiential learning opportunities for veterinary students. These partners are drawn primarily from the Baltimore/Washington metropolitan area and are affiliated with agencies and organizations including the USDA's APHIS and Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS); the Food and Drug Administration (FDA); the Department of Defense; The Department of Homeland Security; the National Institutes of Health (NIH); the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC); the Environmental Protection Agency; the Maryland Departments of Natural Resources, Agriculture, and Health and Mental Hygiene; the Virginia Departments of Health, Agriculture, and Game and Inland Fisheries; the Smithsonian National Zoological Park; the Maryland Zoo in Baltimore; the National Aquarium in Baltimore; and Nutramax, Inc. CPCVM faculty are recognized for their diverse backgrounds and interest in veterinary medical education by their participation on various committees and with organizations such as the Association of American Veterinary Medical Colleges, the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
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CPCVM ACTIVITIES |
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TOPABSTRACTBACKGROUNDCPCVM ACTIVITIESPUBLIC/CORPORATE TRACK GRADUATE...DISCUSSION AND FUTURE DIRECTIONSREFERENCES |
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Approximately 10% of each class enrolls in the public/corporate track, and interests within the group are typically varied, from zoo and wildlife medicine, to research, to regulatory medicine and public health. Courses taught within the track include
These courses are taught on the Blacksburg campus, primarily by CPCVM faculty, using a combination of in-person lectures, videoconferencing, and other distance-learning technologies. Adjunct faculty and other partners are also heavily relied on to provide the most current and relevant material to students. All VMRCVM students are required to complete a fourth-year public/corporate clerkship, and those in the public/corporate track are also required to spend three weeks in College Park, MD, completing the CPCVM Clerkship (VM9794).
This public-policy clerkship is a highly personalized experience designed to offer insights and experience that match students’ interests and provide key contacts for future career opportunities. Clerkships are designed to take advantage of meetings and activities available during the students’ time in the DC metropolitan area, and all students participate in core activities such as meeting representatives from the AVMA's Governmental Relations Division and observing congressional activities. Recent activities for public/corporate clerkship students have included
Each student is also given a project relevant to his or her interests and is encouraged to write the project up and submit it for publication; one such manuscript explores animal health policy considerations related to the spring viremia of carp virus.2
During a recent review of the CPCVM, graduates of the public/corporate track reported being employed in organizations as diverse as the FDA, the EPA, the NIH, the White House, Keystone Foods, Inc., Cobb-Vantress, Inc., Pfizer, Inc., and IDEXX, Inc. Numerous other public/corporate graduates reported pursuing additional training through various residency programs or by obtaining advanced degrees such as a Master of Public Health or PhD. The Center for Veterinary Medicine at the FDA recently estimated that between 20% and 30% of veterinarians employed there are graduates of the VMRCVM. Many public/corporate graduates enter private practice after graduation and later transition to public or corporate practice. While a survey of public/corporate graduate salaries has not been conducted, national surveys and market research indicate that public/corporate veterinarians fare as well economically as their counterparts in clinical medicine, if not better. Veterinarians who graduated from US veterinary medical colleges in 2007 and entered public/corporate practice report a mean starting salary of $57,113, compared to a mean of $58,106 for graduates entering private practice.3 With career progression, however, the median income for all public and corporate veterinarians in 2007 was $97,000, compared with a median of $79,000 for veterinarians in private practice.4
In addition to leading fourth-year clerkships for VMRCVM students in the public/corporate track, the CPCVM also serves as a national clearinghouse for all US veterinary students for clerkships to the USDA APHIS and FSIS, the FDA Center for Veterinary Medicine, the NIH, and SeaWorld.a This arrangement allows for centralization of opportunities and coordination of scheduling and has historically been provided free of charge as a service to the sponsoring organizations.
In 2005, the CPCVM and USDA APHIS signed a cooperative agreement that established the National Public Veterinary Careers Internship Program. Funding provided by APHIS has enabled the CPCVM to hire an additional faculty member with extensive experience in regulatory medicine. This faculty member visits each US veterinary college annually to present and discuss public-practice opportunities, organizes symposia on opportunities in public practice for the annual meetings of the student chapter of the AVMA,b and coordinates all opportunities for veterinary students with USDA APHIS. Over the 2006/2007 academic year, 52 students from 21 veterinary colleges were placed in summer and clinical-year externships with USDA APHIS.
Other educational opportunities organized by the CPCVM lie outside the traditional veterinary curriculum and are offered as continuing-education seminars and courses to graduate veterinarians or as summer fellowships. "Just-in-time" continuing-education offerings have targeted public-practice veterinarians and have addressed topics such as foot-and-mouth disease, West Nile virus, avian influenza, and tick-borne diseases and have been covered by local, state, and national media. For private-practice veterinarians interested in making a transition to public practice, the CPCVM has offered career-transition seminars that include an introduction to opportunities in the public and corporate sectors, guidance in navigating government personnel systems, and a discussion of what additional education and experience might be required to be competitive for such opportunities. The CPCVM has also offered an intensive preparatory course for graduate veterinarians preparing for board certification by the American College of Veterinary Preventative Medicine. The most recent such course was coordinated over 10 weeks in the spring of 2007 in collaboration with Western Kentucky University and took advantage of rapidly developing distance-education technologies to better meet the needs of the individuals interested in taking the course. Thirty-eight veterinarians participated from around the United States and around the world, including Kuwait, Iraq, and Australia. The course was taught using Blackboard,c a common online course-management system, and covered topics including epidemiology and biostatistics, food safety, environmental health, toxicology, public-health policy and administration, infectious diseases, and current topics in veterinary preventive medicine. Instructors posted approximately one and a half to two hours’ worth of PowerPointd presentations to the course Web site and then conducted an interactive online chat or conference call from the comfort of their own offices in locations ranging from Maryland and Pennsylvania to Montana and California.
The CPCVM has hosted fellowships for both veterinary students and graduate veterinarians. A summer fellowship in public policy, co-sponsored by partner organizations, was offered from 2000 through 2004 to veterinary students from the VMRCVM and other US veterinary colleges.e The program was developed to network the future leaders of the veterinary profession with role models actively engaged in homeland security,5 and students were exposed to and met with representatives from numerous federal and state agencies and organizations, attended congressional hearings, received media training, and conducted research projects. The CPCVM is currently coordinating the Washington, DC, component of a VMRCVM summer training program funded by an NIH T32 grant for veterinary students interested in a career in research, with visits to the Executive Office of the President, the FDA, the NIH, and the USDA Agricultural Research Service. The Science, Politics, and Animal Health Policy Executive Fellowship for veterinarians was a collaborative summer program with the University of Minnesota, the Michigan State University College of Veterinary Medicine, and the VMRCVM, whose intent was to build the critical knowledge and skills of mid-career veterinarians in how animal-health policy is developed and how they, as veterinarians, can influence policy. The fellowship comprised three modules—local, state, and international—all of which were designed to be interactive and participatory.
The CPCVM is also responsible for developing and delivering an undergraduate seminar called Veterinary Medicine: Options and Opportunities (ANSC 398V). This course exposes pre-veterinary undergraduate students at the University of Maryland College Park to a range of career options in the veterinary profession, including opportunities in private, public, and corporate practice, and presents discussions of relevant topics facing the profession, such as diversity and work–life balance. Currently, the CPCVM does not offer any post-graduate programs. An applied epidemiology residency program existed for several years and awarded four certificates of residency. Similar programs using a collaborative model with area partners have been proposed for the center; these programs would obviously require substantial planning and dedicated resources to ensure a worthwhile experience.
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PUBLIC/CORPORATE TRACK GRADUATE PROFILES |
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TOPABSTRACTBACKGROUNDCPCVM ACTIVITIESPUBLIC/CORPORATE TRACK GRADUATE...DISCUSSION AND FUTURE DIRECTIONSREFERENCES |
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Because of the VMRCVM's recognized emphasis in public and corporate veterinary medicine, an opportunity was advertised to graduating VMRCVM students to travel to Peru to study Chagas disease in guinea pigs with the CDC. Dr. Richards seized this opportunity and, following her graduation in 2006, worked as a post-doctoral fellow conducting a collaborative project with Johns Hopkins University and the CDC. She conducted field experiments to assess guinea pigs as a major reservoir of Trypanasoma cruzi (the causative agent of Chagas disease) infection; this disease is of particular concern in this area because guinea pigs are a major source of protein in the human diet, and people house guinea-pig herds in corrals infested with T. cruzi–positive reduviid bugs. In addition, Dr. Richards conducted laboratory experiments in which she inoculated guinea pigs with trypanosomes from live cell culture and measured the length of parasitemia, the clinical course of disease, histopathological changes, and other parameters. Dr. Richards decided to practice small animal medicine following her fellowship, and future plans may include a laboratory-animal residency, pursuing a Master of Public Health degree, or application to the CDC's Epidemic Intelligence Service.
Dr. Colby, currently Assistant Director for Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Countermeasures in the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), Executive Office of the President, graduated from the VMRCVM in 1999 and completed a joint MS degree and applied veterinary epidemiology residency at the VMRCVM's College Park campus in 2002. For her research project, she assembled and managed a geographic information system database of the poultry industry6 and explored ways in which such a system could be used for planning and decision support in intensive food-animal production systems. Because of her interests in policy and agriculture and the experience she gained in the residency program, Dr. Colby was selected by the AAAS to serve as a Global Security Fellow in March 2003. She chose to spend her fellowship year at OSTP, where she analyzed critical research on agro- and bioterrorism and public health and coordinated a Blue Ribbon Panel on agro-terrorism. At the conclusion of her fellowship, she was retained by the White House as a policy analyst with subject-matter expertise in public health, veterinary medicine, and agriculture; her many accomplishments in this capacity include establishing an inter-agency subcommittee of the National Science and Technology Council to address the threat from foreign animal diseases and directing an expert panel on companion-animal surveillance. In 2006, Dr. Colby was awarded the Outstanding Alumnus Early Career Award by the University of Maryland College of Agriculture and Natural Resources.
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DISCUSSION AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS |
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TOPABSTRACTBACKGROUNDCPCVM ACTIVITIESPUBLIC/CORPORATE TRACK GRADUATE...DISCUSSION AND FUTURE DIRECTIONSREFERENCES |
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In some ways, the CPCVM is already functioning as the Foresight Project acknowledges is necessary to accommodate the changing needs of the profession. As a center of excellence in the public/corporate focus area, it helps to develop skills and provide opportunities for veterinarians entering one of the acknowledged underserved areas of veterinary medicine through collaborative efforts and by taking advantage of evolving teaching technologies. Its present incarnation, however, is not sufficient to meet current needs, let alone the increased needs anticipated for the future, and there is therefore tremendous opportunity for growth and expansion.
The CPCVM is in transition, with several faculty vacancies; a new director for the CPCVM will be able to chart the future direction of the center, which may include expansion in the fields of public health, public policy, international veterinary medicine, organizational leadership, and the One Health initiative. Approaches for the expansion might include developing post-graduate programs, either advanced degree programs in public health, public administration, or public policy or a residency program in preventive medicine, public practice, or public health. With the recognition that non-technical competencies are critical to career success, whether in public or in private practice, efforts will undoubtedly increase to help veterinary students and graduate veterinarians build their skills in communication, leadership, and management.
Recognizing the increasingly global nature and implications of veterinary public practice, the CPCVM has already augmented its international activities and collaborations, which include relationships in India, Mexico, and Chile. Recently developed student exchange programs with the Universidad Austral de Chile, in Valdivia, Chile, and with Tamil Nadu Veterinary and Animal Sciences University in India will allow veterinary students to experience veterinary medicine in a different area of the world and provide a context for them to learn about international trade issues and policy implications for food-animal production and food safety, including aquaculture. International activities will continue to increase, as a new position, Director of International Programs, has recently been created and filled.
The CPCVM's cooperative agreement with USDA APHIS provides funds to make coordination of all externships at USDA APHIS possible, and one consequence has been an increased student presence at APHIS, with a resultant increase in awareness of opportunities at APHIS among veterinary students and veterinary medical educators. This service has been provided through the efforts of one person, with dedicated time and funding, and it is not possible for the CPCVM to provide this level of service to all agencies without a similar commitment from those agencies. In time, it may be that if an agency or organization wishes to have the CPCVM coordinate their student opportunities, a formal agreement with adequate funding will be required.
As the veterinary profession evolves, and with it the recognition that veterinary medical education must also evolve, the CPCVM is uniquely positioned to build on its tradition of partnership and collaboration and its strengths in training veterinarians for careers in public and corporate veterinary medicine. The center should be responsive to newly recognized needs and aggressively seek ways to address those needs so that it continues to be recognized for innovation and service. As new initiatives are developed, the center should include methods to evaluate its programs periodically and systematically and to measure their impact so that it can provide the best level of service possible to the profession. The CPCVM's history of service to the public and corporate veterinary communities gives it credibility and ensures a future in which new and innovative approaches to collaboration and program development and delivery will be sure to make a positive impact on veterinary public and corporate practice.
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Footnotes |
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Katherine A. Feldman, DVM, MPH, Dipl. ACVPM, was Assistant Director, Center for Public and Corporate Veterinary Medicine at the time this article was written. She currently is State Public Health Veterinarian, Center for Veterinary Public Health, Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, 201 W. Preston St., Rm 317, Baltimore, MD 21201 USA. E-mail: kfeldman{at}dhmh.state.md.us.
Bettye K. Walters, DVM, is Director of the Center for Public and Corporate Veterinary Medicine, and Director, International Programs, Virginia–Maryland Regional College of Veterinary Medicine, University of Maryland, 8075 Greenmead Drive, College Park, MD 20742 USA.
a A complete list of clerkships coordinated by the CPCVM is available at <http://www.vetmed.vt.edu/Organization/Maryland/clerkships.asp>. 
b Presentations from the 2008 symposium are archived and available at <http://www.vetmed.vt.edu/Organization/Maryland/careers_symp.asp>; for the 2007 symposium, see <http://www.vetmed.vt.edu/Organization/Maryland/careers_symp07.asp>.
c Blackboard Inc., Washington, DC 20036 <http://www.blackboard.com/>.
d Microsoft Corp., Redmond, WA 98052-6399 USA <http://www.microsoft.com>.
e A description of the summer fellowship is available at <http://www.vetmed.vt.edu/Organization/Maryland/fellowship.asp>
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REFERENCES |
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TOPABSTRACTBACKGROUNDCPCVM ACTIVITIESPUBLIC/CORPORATE TRACK GRADUATE...DISCUSSION AND FUTURE DIRECTIONSREFERENCES |
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