| The goals of our program are to provide large animal clinical instruction
for veterinary students, interns and residents and to support research
programs to better understand and prevent livestock diseases. We strive
to achieve these objectives by providing excellent clinical service
to local livestock owners. Veterinary service in the Ambulatory and
Production Medicine Clinic is focused on two areas; primary veterinary
care for farm animals and production medicine.
Primary care is provided by clinicians who first examine, diagnose
and treat patients. For livestock in our area, this is most often
done by veterinarians who travel to farms. Although the nature of
large animal veterinary work has changed dramatically in recent
decades, there is still a large demand for individual-animal services
on farms. Skills in this area are also the foundation for providing
more comprehensive herd health or production medicine programs.
Production medicine is a focus within food or large animal veterinary
practice which addresses management and husbandry issues in order
to improve health, productivity and profit for livestock businesses.
Veterinarians providing production medicine services use information
from epidemiology, agricultural engineering, nutrition, economics,
and personnel management in addition to traditional veterinary skills.
Caseload: Our clinic makes about 3600 farm calls and provides veterinary
services for approximately 37,000 animals annually. The majority
of calls and cases in our region deal with dairy cattle including
routine procedures such as vaccinations, pregnancy diagnosis, dehorning
and disease screening programs, as well as medicine and surgery
of individual animals. Roughly one-fifth of the calls involve horses,
and almost half of these are for diagnosis and treatment of individual
cases. The remaining caseload is divided among sheep, goats, pigs,
and camelids.
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