Development and Evaluation of a New Educational Resource for Farm-Health Planning

ABSTRACT Simple Templates for Everyday Planning and Support (STEPS) was created to illustrate the dynamic process of farm-health planning. Farm-health planning, also known as herd health or flock health planning, is a holistic, proactive management approach to animal health and welfare. This resource was used in a teaching seminar held for two groups of fourth-year veterinary students over a two-year period. Students answered a questionnaire before and after the teaching seminar that revealed that most participants believed the new resource had increased their knowledge of and ability to undertake farm-health planning. Students also completed one of four species-specific case examples that were evaluated by the first author. Most students (90.7%) included at least half of the essential farm-health planning factors in their case example submission. Twenty-six of these essential health planning factors were included by at least 80% of study participants. Six essential health planning factors received less t...