Veterinary Nurse Training

USE OF VETERINARY NURSE TRAINING IN COLLEGES OF EDUCATION

We have received a number of enquiries from training colleges asking for guidance in how our books may be used by them to train students without infringing the copyright. Some principals have asked about photocopying, some have asked about adapting the lectures in their own words and distributing the revised notes to their students and some have asked about purchasing sets for distribution to their students. Of these, some have wanted to buy books individually as they were required throughout the course. In consequence, we are writing this letter to every training college to make them aware of our responses to their various questions.

The books have been written and funded by veterinary surgeons in general practice. They have been made available at what is generally held to be a surprisingly low price, given that the entire set weighs about 6.5kg before postage. The only way that this was possible was to negotiate a price per full set with the printers and give them a contract for a specific number of full sets. We explored the possibility of taking orders for less than full sets, eg. for Part 1 only or for the two volumes of multiple choice questions and answers, and printing off books as they were required by orders coming in, but the printing costs would have soared if this had been done and the sets would no longer have come within the price target set by us as something which we felt that a student nurse with no significant financial help could still afford. Paradoxically, it is cheaper to buy a complete set of ten books and perhaps have to throw some away unused than to make them available in smaller numbers according to short-term requirements.

On the question of photocopying, we have to insist on compliance with the copyright warning in the front of each book. These books are the distillation of 15 years VN training and experience, and it would be neither ethical nor legal to photocopy them. Indeed, without the postage costs, one would have to be able to photocopy them (on heavyweight 100 gsm paper rather than the usual 80 gsm photocopier paper) for a price of about 5p per page to even equal the purchase price and quality. We do not think that it is worth either the trouble or the risks to save such a small amount of money.

These books are designed both to be taught from directly by the tutor and for the students to retain individually as a written record of the lectures without having to break concentration to make notes. Student written notes, whether from speech or from the blackboard, are inevitably liable to be less than complete and to contain misspellings and inaccuracies. These are the lecture notes from which we train our students and, if a college wished to train from them in the same way, they would largely negate the need for the college tutors to write their own lecture notes or their own multiple choice or practical examination questions and answers.

Having said that, there is still a great deal of room for the tutor to illustrate the lectures as we do by the use of support material such as, for example, blood smears and histology slides when doing anatomy and physiology, or by the use of extended graphics for any section. There is great scope here for individual enhancement of the course by the tutor in translating written descriptions of practical work into competently performed tasks. There will also always be areas where students need further explanation and illustration and it is there that the tutor can best supplement the basic text and diagrams.

There are two ways in which we can envisage a training college using these books without involving a breach of copyright.
1) If the college purchases a complete set per student under training.
It should be possible to offset the increase in costs to the college (of the book set) by savings in staff time writing their own lecture notes and photocopying costs in duplicating and distributing those notes. The books could remain the property of the college or be given to the student on completion of the course, and the course fees would no doubt reflect this. The tutor would lecture directly from the appropriate Veterinary Nurse Training book and the student would revise from her own identical copy. Any amount of extra material could be included by the college or, if it were wished, alterations or omissions could be made. The examination sets would be issued to the students only as an exam was flagged up in the lecture series at the beginning of each book, then collected afterwards. It has been pointed out that a student could complete an exam and then look forwards to see the questions in future exams. However, if she is good enough to have the time and memory to do this she is probably unlikely to fail in the first place. The same applies to buying her own set and learning the questions.

2) If the college tutor lectures from the Veterinary Nurse Training books but recommends the book set as a set text rather than having them purchased by the college.
It would be hoped that either the student, or her practice, or her parents or relatives would be able to purchase a set to provide the paper equivalent of the college lecture. If not, she would be reliant on taking notes during the lecture, because the college could obviously not issue the lectures in photocopied form. A further disadvantage of this method is that the college would not be able to use the integrated multiple choice examination sets (unless by arrangement with the student purchasers in which they handed their exam sets to the college). Of course, the college could write its own multiple choice tests and recommend to the students that they used the Veterinary Nurse Training examination books to self-test at home as a supplement to the college tests.

The last question concerns the possibility of a college adapting our books to write its own lecture notes. Like any training course in any subject, what has been written in Veterinary Nurse Training has drawn on the work of many authors and many texts. In addition, there has been included the experience of the authors in general practice and in many years of nurse training. Everything has been selectively collated and presented in a hitherto unique form for training and it is felt that any tutor wishing to present original work would have to go through this process from first principles, rather than to simply take a published text and change a few words to give the impression of originality. In such a case, Veterinary Nurse Training would become just one source of material amongst many, but if it were brought to our attention that a broadly similar text to these volumes was being used for training then we would regretfully have to take appropriate action.

When we made these books available the profession it was done in a spirit of sharing what we had with student nurses at a price which would be affordable. Unfortunately, a degree of commercial reality has been imposed upon us and we have been forced to protect our work. We feel that the books are so affordable that requests to photocopy them or make lightly disguised adaptations of them are rather unreasonable. We would hope that they will be purchased and used in the spirit of the advancement of VN training rather than that of saving every penny possible. If you would bear that in mind, we would be happy to discuss any other points which you may have as a result of this correspondence.

Jacqueline M Buck, BVM&S, MRCVS, VN
Charles M Ross, BVMS, MRCVS