UC Davis veterinary students are taught well in hospital work: complicated surgeries, cancer and other diseases.

But the students receive equally intense training on the community practice side of the William R. Pritchard Veterinary Medical Teaching Hospital, in preparation for careers as general practitioners, or “family” practice vets, so to speak.

“This is one of the most important rotations for us,” said John Wesson, who is due to graduate in June and go straight to work in a small-animal general practice in Potomac, Md.

To make this training in primary care the best it can be, the School of Veterinary Medicine has expanded its Community Practice for Small Animals, and, to provide an adequate client load, established a 10 discount for staff and faculty from all over UC Davis, for pet care in the community practice or anywhere else in the teaching hospital. (For added convenience, the Community Practice for Small Animals offers "day condos," where you can board your pet, then go off to work — until returning for your pet's appointment. See separate story.)

“Not only will your pet receive outstanding care, but you’ll be part of our teaching experience, helping to train our veterinary students and future alumni,” Dean Bennie Osburn said.

The Community Practice for Small Animals comprises two units: medicine and surgery. Community Surgery emphasizes spaying and neutering and other general surgical procedures such as removing bladder stones, closing lacerations and removing skin masses.

The Community Medicine side focuses on wellness care, disease prevention or management, vaccinations, parasite control and proper nutrition, as well as behavioral tools to enhance and maintain your pet’s health.

One day last week, the faculty, staff and students handled 20 or so appointments, from puppy exams and vaccinations, to a limping dog, an abscess in a cat’s paw, sudden weight loss in a geriatric cat and a lump on a dog’s side.

When you come in for a visit, a fourth-year student like Wesson will greet you and your pet, take the pet’s history and do an initial exam.

Then, faculty member Julie Meadows or associate Tiffany Hahn jump in, conducting their own exams, asking more questions and providing instruction all through the process.

The clients — people like Kim Robinson of Sacramento — get an education, too, as they listen in. “You learn so much from the interaction between the teacher and the student,” she said one day last week while visiting the community practice clinic with Jack, a 10-month-old dog she had adopted a few days earlier.

Robinson said she was pleased with the care that another of her dogs had received at the Veterinary Medical Teaching Hos-pital. So, when she brought another dog into her home, she did not hesitate to bring him to the same place for routine care.

“You always have two or three people working on the same case, so it makes sense,” she said.

One of those people is a seasoned veteran: Dr. Meadows. She prods her students to consider all their options in developing treatment plans. She gently corrects. She is ever-present, always teaching.

In one case that Meadows is dealing with this day, she takes one side of a two-headed microscope while a student takes the other, allowing them to look at a single slide at the same time — to analyze the pus that the student had suctioned from a lump in a dog named X (probably an infection related to a foxtail).

In another case, Meadows holds the head of a mildly sedated cat named Charlie while watching a student treat the abscess in the feline’s left rear paw.

Meadows is constantly on the move, between the clinic’s exam and treatment rooms in one building, and radiography in another. On her way to the ultrasound room to see what might be the problem in a dog’s gut, she jokes that she should get a pedometer.

When dealing with Mocha Mix, a 15-year-old cat that is losing weight at a fast clip, Meadows calls in all of her students for a lesson on the treatment of a geriatric pet. When the student assigned to the case has a hard time peering into the back of the cat’s eye (with a magnifier, as a way to check for high blood pressure), Meadows declares: “It’s only hard because you don’t do it all the time. If you do it all the time, it will be no big whoop.”

Then, with all attention focused on the orange tabby’s eyes, Meadows points out the black specks on the eyelids, nose and lips, noting that spots like these show up over time and often make clients worry about melanoma. In fact, Meadows says, they are harmless “orange kitty freckles” (officially, lentigo).

These are not “in-and-out” visits, Meadows cautioned. These are thorough visits for the benefit of students and pets alike.

‘The value of general practice’

Meadows worked in private practice in Turlock and Modesto for 20 years before coming back to her alma mater in 2008 as section head of Small Animal Community Medicine and an assistant professor.

“I believe so much in the value of general practice that I made the leap to come here and talk about it,” she said.

Now she is providing the kind of entry-level training that the School of Veterinary Medicine did not provide when she went through her training (graduating in 1988). “You had all the concepts, but not the experience — like how to do a puppy visit,” she said.

Now, she said, UC Davis and other veterinary schools are embracing a return to basics. The students could not be more pleased.

“I feel confident about starting my career,” Wesson said, “because we pull it all together here, to help people with the full scope of their pets’ medical care.”

He said his rotation in the community practice clinic has prepared him for the routine, and his rotations elsewhere in the Veterinary Medical Teaching Hospital have defined “the line” where routine care stops and specialized care begins.

Today, the community practice rotation lasts two weeks. Wesson said he wished it were longer. And, according to Meadows, it will be — perhaps up to eight weeks long.

Jessica McAfee, who has a job lined up in a general practice in Sacramento, described her rotation in community practice as “the most realistic and most practical” of her rotations.

Earlier this day, she quizzed Jack’s “parents” about their household and their plans for Jack — would he be around other dogs, would he be an indoor dog or an outdoor dog, would he join his family for camping trips, would he go swimming in lakes and rivers.

“All those things are important to set the foundation for our treatment plan, so we can tailor it to the individual pet and his or her family situation,” McAfee said.