Student Veterinary Nurses Research Articles

The practice laboratory — Part 1: a student's guide

ABSTRACT:The aim of this, and subsequent, articles is to provide student veterinary nurses with a guide to the practice laboratory. It will cover the basic equipment used in most in-house practice laboratories, as well as some of the common tests that as students you will be learning about and performing. It has been my experience that nurses either love or hate laboratory work – and it's my intention that this guide will appeal to both groups.

Literature searching and reviewing

As veterinary nursing evolves as a profession in its own right with a greater importance being placed on evidence-based nursing care, it is vitally important that all veterinary nurses (VN) are able to both search for information and evidence to support and justify their nursing actions, and review these to ascertain their meaning and benefits to their practice. Information and evidence, or literature as it will subsequently be referred to throughout the article, is presented in a variety of different ways and typically categorized as primary, secondary or tertiary literature. A fourth category of information source is also described, which is called Gray literature. The difference between these categories of literature are considered. Depending on the status of the VN at any given point in time, for example whether they are a student VN, an undergraduate student VN, a graduate student VN or a qualified VN, the reasons for their literature searching and reviewing will be different. VNs studying towards a qualification will be required to search for and review literature to support their academic work, whether this relates to their discussions in an assignment or whether it relates to them trying to identify a gap in existing knowledge on a subject to justify their desire to conduct a piece of research. Having initially outlined what is considered to be a source of knowledge or piece of literature, this article aims to explore some of the problems associated with literature searching, provide guidance with regards to conducting an effective literature search, before finally considering how a VN can effectively and appropriately review a piece of literature; all VNs must be able to decide whether an article, research report or book they read is valid, current and reliable.

Important helminth endoparasites of dogs and cats

This article is intended as a study guide for student veterinary nurses and as a review for qualified veterinary nurses, covering the most important helminth endoparasites seen in dogs and cats in this country. We will touch on the most common endoparasites as well as mentioning some rarer, but nonetheless, important, infections. It is beyond the scope of this article to detail the life cycles of each parasite, though it is important to be familiar with them.

Preparing to Train: The Assessors

Learning to assess student veterinary nurses involves lots of hard work. Assessors for the veterinary nursing S/NVQ scheme act as mentors to candidates on the scheme, provide them with feedback and support, and help them to assemble their porfolios. What do the trainers themselves think of their own training:? Joy Howell asked three head nurses about their D unit training