Creating Community Partners in Veterinary Social Work
Creating Community Partners in Veterinary Social Work
Room C
Presented By
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Marianna Spiotta, LMSWMore Info
Brought to You By
This presentation will provide a description of an emerging partnership between a university Veterinary Social Work program and community-based animal shelter.
Shelter employees are the intersection of pet owner surrender, animals entering a stressful shelter-life with probability of illness and euthanasia looming. In this partnership, university-based Veterinary Social Workers began an outreach initiative to educate area shelter and veterinary clinic professionals on VSW principles and availability for resources within the community. At the request of shelter staff, psychoeducation was provided on the significance of pet loss, grief, and the ripple out communication challenges from complex grief presentation, compassion fatigue and grief self-care. Pre- and post-test were administered to assess baseline knowledge and changes.
This presentation will describe the psychoeducation content provided to shelter workers on the content described above as well as an evaluation of changes in knowledge following the training.
The educational goal of this workshop is for participants to learn about the process of conducting community outreach to shelter workers.
At the end of this course, participants will be able to:
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Participants will be able to identify content related to grief and compassion fatigue provided to shelter employees.
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Participants will analyze change in knowledge of VSW and communication skills as assessed for the described presentation.
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Brannick, E. M., DeWilde, C. A., Frey, E., Gluckman, T. L., Keen, J.L., Larsen, M. R., Mont, S. L., Rosenbaum, M.D., Stafford, J. R., Heike, K. L. (2015). Taking stock and making strides towards wellness in the veterinary workplace. Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association, 247(7), 739 – 742.
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Holcombe, T. M., Strand, E. B., Nugent, W. R. & Ng, Z. Y. (2016). Veterinary social work: Practice within veterinary settings. Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment, 26(1), 69 – 80.
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White, D. J. & Shawhan, R. (2996). Emotional responses of animal shelter workers to euthanasia. Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association 208(6), 846 – 849.
