Antimicrobial drugs are critical to the practice of medicine whether the patients are humans or animals. Annually, these drugs save millions of lives, but the rapid rise of antimicrobial resistance threatens their utility. There is a need for improved antimicrobial stewardship education across all healthcare settings including veterinary medicine. There has been very little research into how best to teach the appropriate use of antimicrobials to veterinary students and how best to assess their learning. This study brings together veterinary microbiologists from across 5 academic institutions (University of Pennsylvania, Virginia Tech, Colorado State University, Washington State University and the Ohio State University) to develop and validate two rubrics that assess the quality of an antimicrobial choice and then thoroughness of an antimicrobial therapy plan. Validity of the rubric will be assessed by the consistency of score across different raters. The rubric will then guide the development of teaching cases that will be freely available for teaching institutions following the study period. These cases and rubrics will subsequently be used to evaluate the utility of a mnemonic device called SODAPOP. We hypothesize that this mnemonic device will help students to make better decisions when prescribing antimicrobials and create more thorough plans. We will assess student confidence and competence in antimicrobial selection by an intervention study across the five institutions with 250-300 veterinary students. First, students will be assigned a survey and random cases from those previously developed. Then all students will be taught with didactic ?rounds? about antimicrobial drugs, but half of them will also be taught the SODAPOP mnemonic. Then students will be assigned surveys and cases immediately following the intervention and with two-week follow-up. We will assess the efficacy of SODAPOP by comparison of survey and case scores from before and after the intervention. This study develops and examines widely needed tools (standardized cases, rubrics and a mnemonic device) for veterinary educators to teach and assess antimicrobial use. Improved education will pair with other important stewardship efforts to improve the prescribing of these critical drugs and slow the spread of antimicrobial resistant bacteria in veterinary medicine.
In order to mitigate the spread of antimicrobial resistant bacteria, there is a need to improve and increase antimicrobial stewardship education in veterinary settings. This study aims to improve the ways we teach antimicrobial stewardship to veterinary students and how we assess those methods.
