OSCE

Well, this post is being written from home in CT!  I took my clinical exam (OSCE) on Thursday morning.  It consisted of 16 stations at which I had to perform various skills including:

Station 1: demonstrate how to obtain an EKG from a dog, and how to obtain a doppler blood pressure on a dog

Station 2: draw blood (in this case it wasn't actually blood but rather some red colored fluid) from a jugular vein on a dog model, select a tube needed for a certain blood test, and demonstrate how to run a hematocrit (this shows the animal's red blood cell level in an animal's blood).

Station 3: put on a sterile surgical gown and sterile gloves, and drape a patient for surgery with sterile drapes

Station 4: demonstrate the proper technique for small animal radiographs and run the radiograph machine

Station 5: use the ultrasound machine to identify objects in a model, and demonstrate how to open a sterile bowl and properly pour sterile saline into the bow.

Station 6: demonstrate three different suture patterns: cushing pattern, simple interrupted pattern, and cruciate pattern

Station 7: scrub my hands and arms for surgery, and perform open gloving technique

Station 8: insert and secure an IV catheter in a model

Station 9: I was told to get the bay mare out of her stall so I had to choose her out of probably 6 or 7 different horses and bring her out of her stall.  Then, I had to demonstrate different twitch positions, where you would check for a pulse near their feet (I failed to find the pulse), and how to pick up a front leg, and explain how to pick up a back leg.

Station 10: take a horse's heartbeat, show where a horse's lungs lie in their body, take a rectal temperature on a horse, assess the horse's mucous membrane color (their gums) and moistness, point out where I would listen to the horse's cecum at

Station 11: put on a cow halter (I ended up putting it on upside down, go me!), tie it as if you wanted to draw blood from the cow's jugular vein, demonstrate how to tie a tail tie (used when you want to tie the tail out of the way so you can work on a cow or horse's hind end with the tail out of the way), and explain and show the techniques required to perform a blood draw from the cow's coccygeal vein

Station 12: demonstrate reflective listening, take a cow's rumen contraction rate, identify the two large lymph nodes that are palpable on a cow and name them, name the bony protuberances of the hip and leg that are used as landmarks when figuring out how thin a cow is

Station 13: ask an open-ended and a close-ended question, wrap a horse's leg correctly

Station 14: intubate a model dog head, follow the flow of air through an anesthesia machine while naming parts of the machine, calculate a drug dose

Station 15: identify various instruments used when administering large amounts of drugs to large animals and demonstrate how to use some of them

Station 16: approach a client as if I was the doctor and communicate with them effectively, demonstrate proper restraint of a dog for various procedures

All in all, it wasn't really that bad of an exam and I think I did alright.  It was nice because we could actually get feedback from the professors/technicians at each station at the end of that station to see where we need to improve (such as put a cow halter on the right way) and where we did well.

Thursday I was supposed to fly to CT however snow and wind made it so I didn't fly out until Friday.  Then last night we had our Gerber Christmas, it was loads of fun, pictures will be coming once I end up back in Illinois! Hope everyone has a very merry Christmas!