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Guidance on official training time and how students should record this.

In order to be eligible to enter the RCVS Register of Veterinary Nurses upon successful completion of your course, students need to be able to present the evidence required to show they have completed the required time in clinical placement.

It is the student’s responsibility to keep their record of training up to date and get this signed off by the RCVS designated signatory at the end of their placement.

In order to do this, everyone involved in training need to be aware of what constitutes ‘official’ training time.

What constitutes as official training time?

As you will already know, throughout the degree course, students are required to complete a MINIMUM of 1800 hours working in an RCVS approved Training Practice or Auxiliary Training Practice.

Throughout ÎåÒ»³Ô¹Ï×îйÙÍø courses this is met via:

• The 10 week placement at the end of Year 1
• The sandwich year

The RCVS state that degree students can ONLY work as a Student Veterinary Nurse when they are on a university placement that is part of their course, i.e. the 10 week block placement at the end of year one, or your sandwich year.

Only time completed on these placements can count towards official RCVS training hours.

If students wish to go back and work in practice outside of these times, they cannot work as a Student Veterinary Nurse (which includes Schedule 3 work such as I/M and I/V injections). What they can do, is work as an auxiliary member of the team, e.g. a Veterinary Care Assistant. Such hours worked CANNOT count towards the student’s official training time.

Students CANNOT include breaks within their official training time. For example, if the student’s working week was lucky enough to be Monday to Friday, 9-6pm and they had a one hour lunch break each day, they would be doing 8 hours of official training time each day, equating to 40 hours a week.

If students are on clinical placement and required to work a night shift, it will depend on the nature of the night shift as to whether this time can count towards their official training time.

If they are working an entire shift with a team all night, this can count.

If the student is simply asleep upstairs and popping down periodically to check on patients, this cannot count.

Time off sick will also need to be deducted from the students official training time and likewise holidays and bank holidays that students haven’t worked obviously don’t count either.

So, to summarise; the following CANNOT count towards official training time:

• Breaks during working hours
• Annual leave
• Bank holidays (where the student was not scheduled to work)
• Night shifts (where the student simply sleeps upstairs and pops down to check on inpatients)
• Time off sick or for hospital appointments etc.
• Any time spent in practice that is NOT a part of their course.

We use the Record of Training document to record the students official training hours; See completed example (under Documents). The student’s placement resource allows them access to blank copies of the record of training as well as a completed example for them to follow. These are also available to clinical coaches.

We advise student to do the following in relation to their record of training:

• Keep the document up to date.
• Keep the document safe – we will ask for a scanned copy of the signed record of training after the student completes each placement so we also have a copy.
• Save their record of training in several places, just in case of technical problems.