Learning how to take a history is an extremely important discipline in the education of veterinary students. In our opinion the fact that this discipline is often neglected in traditional teaching is a big mistake.

The mere thought of facing a real client can be almost paralysing to even the smartest student. So the more familiar a student can become with these situations the better.

Since september 2006, veterinary students at Faculty of Life Sciences, University of Copenhagen, have received training in the discipline of history taking, using innovative educational methods:

Online
The students prepare themselves for the course by going online at home the day before class. Here they find a narrated PowerPoint presentation containing :
1) The principles of history taking
2) Client diversities – and the obstacles one might have to face with these different types of clients

Video
In class a series of videos are shown to the students. These videos shows different situations from the clinic and illustrate different types of clients. Some situations are taken from real life, others are made using actors.
Each situation is discussed in class – we look at the obvious hurdles that we meet with the different types of clients, and we discuss any mistakes done by the veterinarian.
Subjects such as ethical values, bad conscience, euthanasia, new family members, value of life, economy, maltreatment, etc. are often discussed.

Live Role Playing
We end up with a session of Live Role Play - the teacher/veterinarian acting as a client and one or two students acting as the veterinarian.
Letting the teacher act as the client instead of an actor doing it, has two benefits. First of all the teacher is able to answer any question in a feasible way, knowing what the symptoms would be like in a given situation. Secondly, the students won’t be intimidated by the situation, as they are already familiar with the ‘client’. The ‘client’/teacher must be able to perform as different types of clients to make the sessions more interesting, colourful and fun.
During these Live Role sessions, the students will get help and good advice from the ‘audience’. This way everybody in class participates and learn – and we all have fun!