Class is in for dog health

Commanding an auditorium with more than 1000 eager school students wasn’t quite what a team of University of Melbourne students had in mind when they were planning how to deliver a dog education program in Sikkim, India, earlier this year.

Developed and delivered in collaboration with Australian-based Vets Beyond Borders (VBB), the pilot project, which built on the highly successful Sikkim Anti-Rabies and Animal Health Program (SARAH), was funded through a University of Melbourne Vice-Chancellor’s Engagement Grant. 

Far from the expected classroom sizes of around 30 pupils, team member and Doctor of Veterinary Medicine student Aashima Auplish says many of the participating schools had several hundred students in each session. In just two weeks the project reached an audience of more than 8700 people.

“We delivered the program in April for two weeks, and every day we went to various schools where we’d run about three to four sessions at each school. When we got to the first school they informed us they had 3000 students and they’d all like to take part in the session,” she says.

“So we adapted program delivery and it was very successful. Rather than the project team individually delivering presentations, we’d sometimes run sessions with all three of us with 1000 students if the school had an auditorium.”

Program content focused on three areas of education – identifying dog behaviour, rabies treatment and identification, and rabies prevention – followed up with a section on general dog health and wellbeing, and how these approaches impact on individuals and pet owners. The project concept dovetailed perfectly with Vets Beyond Borders’ longer-term aim to create robust education programs around its existing projects. 

The project team – Ms Auplish, Alison Clarke, Trent Van Zanten and project leader Dr Kate Abel – worked on developing content for around eight months, creating a model of delivery which could be applied to other similar in-country programs. The suite of material included slide show handouts, skits, inflatable dogs and a number of pre-prepared videos.

Dr Charmaine Tham, President of VBB, says the SARAH project offered a great opportunity to begin exploring the inclusion of an education program across the organisation’s work in other countries. Findings from the team’s experience will now be used to inform a proposal for education programs for all VBB programs.

“The SARAH project was established in 2006 and is very much a collaborative effort between Vets Beyond Borders, our funding body, Fondation Brigitte Bardot in France, and the local Sikkim government to run these animal health, desexing and vaccination programs, mainly to reduce rabies,” Dr Tham says.

“And we’ve done this very successfully – Sikkim hasn’t had rabies for a very long time, so when Aashima approached us last year, we were ready to take the project to its next stage and develop a community education focus around the program.

“The challenge for each of our program volunteers and staff across the world is to develop and deliver engaging education programs, which take into account a number of unique factors like the language barrier or in-country limitations. The student team did a wonderful job of transcending some of these challenges on this project, and created a very impressive program. The quality of work they delivered was outstanding.”

The next step for the team is to collate findings on the success of the pilot project and begin building a body of knowledge around community education approaches.

Already the project has sparked interest from other organisations. Ms Auplish is currently completing a two-month internship in Geneva with the World Health Organization, largely a result of connections made throughout the development and delivery of the project.

“It’s important that we map the impact of our work,” she says. “Most NGOs and their funding bodies need solid evidence to implement these types of programs, so we hope to illustrate that impact through a range of methods we used throughout the project delivery.”

www.vetsbeyondborders.org/