Professional education and aquatic animal health: a focus on aquatic veterinarians and veterinary para-professionals

摘要

The rapid growth of global aquaculture has resulted in challenges typically seen in any new developing agricultural industry, including an increase in disease outbreaks among aquatic animal species. Ensuring an adequate number of well-trained and skilled aquatic veterinarians and veterinary para-professionals, together with the national, regional and global infrastructure to prevent, control and possibly eradicate aquatic animal diseases is, therefore, an imperative. The current challenge in the burgeoning aquaculture field is to determine the diverse veterinary and paraveterinary skills and services needed in an aquatic veterinary workforce, the education necessary to ensure these skills, what educational and training programmes currently exist andwhat education refinements are needed to expand the workforce and produce deliverable veterinary services. Several programmes to evaluate and address these needs have either recently been established or are in development in multiple countries around the globe. These include: the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) Performance of Veterinary Services (PVS) processes, including Gap Analysis, to evaluate a country's veterinary infrastructure; the efforts of the OIE Ad hoc Group on Veterinary Education (AHG) to examine minimum veterinary educational needs; and the development of academic and extra-academic educational opportunities and credentialing programmes for aquatic veterinarians and veterinary para-professionals.