The university is closing the three-year veterinary technology degree from next year while it reviews its long-term viability.
The degree is advertised on the university’s website as diverse, providing graduates with a variety of transferable skills, including working with veterinary specialists in a vet hospital or with government and private organisations to help maintain and protect the health and welfare of wildlife, exotic, companion and production animals.
It is one of only four such courses offered internationally.
The university said graduates can perform similar tasks to vets, with the exception of performing surgical procedures, diagnosing and prescribing medication.
Veterinary science head Professor Jon Huxley said “The bachelor of veterinary technology is financially unsustainable in its current funding rate and cohort size.”
Its graduates are highly valued in New Zealand, partly because of the substantial component of clinical training.
Dairy Cattle Veterinarians Society committee member Kate Sommerville suspects the course was too gold-plated for a technician’s role in most rural practices.
“Vet techs are very practical, passionate people and the best way for them to gain their skills is on the job with practical experience.”
She was surprised by the level of technical teaching the Massey graduates had been given, often well beyond what is expected of a vet tech in the field.
So losing the course will not be devastating for large animal practices.
It lets Massey revisit and rework a more relevant, practically focused qualification.
“If we could work with Massey where a tech could pick a practice to work and be bonded to and Massey develops a structure for training and a qualification from that. We know big practices are doing their own training but at present there is no way to measure and certify it.”
Southland veterinarian Mark Bryan said two of VetSouth’s 30 technicians have the degree.
“And they have been outstanding. But you do wonder, with 25 graduates a year, and we only have two out of 30, you have to question where they all end up.”
Bryan said he was also concerned the course was too high level with an intense amount of physiology, anatomy and nursing study required for a job that is often not that glamorous.
Typically, in a rural practice a veterinary technician will be found doing repetitive, physically demanding tasks like pregnancy scanning, dry-cow administration and vaccination routines in herds.
Most VetSouth technicians come from a farming background or exhibit an affinity for animals and are trained in-house.
He also sees something of a gap in veterinary training, with the vet tech degree offering a high level of training at one end and polytech training sometimes variable quality at the other.
“To my mind the best training for a vet tech is through an apprenticeship, often the only way you can learn is on the job and also giving them a day a week to study and earn some sort of qualification.”
Bryan has long been concerned about the need for a formal qualification for para-professionals in the veterinary sector who might be involved in vet tech roles like pregnancy scanning and calf disbudding.
One long time veterinarian suspects the vet tech degree risked reflecting what had happened to physiotherapy when it became a four-year degree course.
“You found that it became a very academic course with lots of course work when, in reality, what you ended up doing was a lot of the same exercises.”
It is also often more appealing for vet clinics to hire a veterinary graduate rather than a vet tech graduate.
“The vet graduates just want to get out and get their hands dirty, you can send them out after hours and the pay difference between the two is not that great at that stage.”
Huxley said Massey welcomes feedback on the programme while it investigates ways to improve the qualification’s long-term sustainability.
“We would strongly encourage vets and stakeholders from the wider industry to provide us with feedback,” he said.
