Shelter Medicine, Community Engagement, and Survey of One Health

This rotation is organized by the Penn Vet Shelter Medicine and Community Engagement Program, in collaboration with community and university One Health partners. The rotation activities involve community outreach and collaborative partnerships to achieve educational goals for training veterinary students in animal welfare, shelter medicine, community engagement, educational principles, One Health, and human animal interactions, while also serving our community using veterinary programming and philanthropy. This rotation gives students an overview of the field of shelter medicine and community engagement, integrating population health, medical health, behavioral health, and educational concepts. It also integrates direct experiences that apply the One Health framework. These opportunities will be provided through a variety of formats, including a service-learning model where students and faculty are interacting with the community through open and limited admission shelters, schools, and outreach organizations such as Pets for Life. A typical rotation focuses on authentic hands-on learning including two surgical days, mentored primary case management of medical cases and shelter population rounds, public clinical outreach, herd health management, training and behavioral assessment, outreach to local schools, and providing veterinary CE for shelter staff. Rounds and tour topics include shelter medicine practice, biosecurity, cruelty investigation and humane law enforcement, behavior, ethics, exotics, and risk analysis. Other opportunities such as consults may occasionally be included as part of the rotation depending on the week. Because Penn Vet works with outside organizations, keep in mind the schedule can change as our partners' needs change. This course occurs off-campus in a variety of locations and students must coordinate their own transportation. Two of the three weeks are focused on community and shelter medicine and the third week is focused on One Health related topics. Although the clinical focus of this rotation is shelter medicine, this area of practice encapsulates broad clinical skills, and students will develop skills and experiences that are valuable broadly in the practice of veterinary medicine including in communication, contextualized care, access to care, public health promotion, biosecurity, and population medicine. 8 Credit Hours