Students in the veterinary medicine faculty, at the University of Calgary, are learningintroductory equine clinical skills with the help of three full-size horse simulators—the only models of their kindin the world

Originally developed to help students learn techniques such as rectal palpation and abdominal (belly) taps, fundingfrom the Equine Foundation of Canada (EFC) allowed expansion of their capabilities.

The equine simulators are sophisticated models that teach students how to perform a variety of procedures beforethey start working on live horses, says Emma Read, a large animal surgery instructor and chair of Clinical SkillsCourses for the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine.

“Inside the abdomen, there is a simulated intestinal tract so we can demonstrate to the students how it’s arrangedand then we can show them the kind of displacements or intestinal accidents that can happen within the abdomen,”she says. “We can blow up different parts of GI tract—we can inflate or deflate different parts to create differentdisplacements.”

Faculty at UCVM have been working to create more sophisticated simulators for a variety of clinical skills. Earlierversions of simulators Read and her colleagues developed were pretty simple.

“They were very crude,” she says. “We had a Rubbermaid tub with a hole cut out in the surface and we made some fakeskin and we would put cadaver GI tracts in there for teaching surgery and we had IV tubing under tanned calf hideto simulate a jugular vein for students to learn to take blood.”

The faculty worked with experts in building movie props and educational tools at Veterinary Simulator Industries tocreate the three equine simulators as well as three cow simulators. The simulators are getting a lot of interestfrom other schools.

“They are prototype models,” says Read. “Recently I had four phone calls or emails from different schools acrossNorth America wanting to find out what we were using it for and where they could buy one.”

Members of the EFC who toured the Clinical Skills Building at the Spy Hill campus in early December were impressedwith the equine simulators they helped produce. The Equine Foundation is a registered charity that provides fundingfor the five veterinarian medicine programs in Canada.

source: Veterinary Medicine Faculty, Universityof Calgary

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