UK FECAVA Travel Scholarship winners visit Romania

8 June 2016

The lucky UK recipients of the 2016 FECAVA Travel Scholarship, vets Alasdair Hotston Moore and Alex Gough, have returned from Romania as part of an exchange with two vets from Bucharest.  Back in February, Justin Girea and Livia Dumitrescu from Bucharest, travelled to experience life at the veterinary practice in Bath where Alasdair and Alex work.

Alasdair describes the recent visit to Romania below:

“During our time visiting the Ortovet Clinic in Bucharest, we examined several long term in-patients, discussed their treatment and Alex demonstrated neurological examination.

I attended the Bucharest Veterinary College annual meeting which had a Thoracic Surgery theme with Professor Fossum as the keynote speaker, while Alex delivered a workshop in echocardiography.  I then visited a local clinic specialising in endoscopy and enjoyed discussing mutual experiences with the owner.

Along with the help of Ortovet and SyneoVet Lab, we hosted a CPD event for 80 delegates where we lectured on ENT surgery, Pathology and Echocardiography.   The feedback indicated that the delegates enjoyed the day, commenting on the useful practical approaches and finding out about laryngeal paralysis in particular. I also visited the Bucharest University Veterinary Clinic, where Dr Vitalaru gave me a tour of his successful haemodialysis clinic.

We found the visit to Bucharest to be very successful. Our hosts at Ortovet made us very welcome and in between the veterinary activities, we were able to experience Romanian culture with visits to the Romanian Parliament Palace, the Natural History Museum,
the Royal Palace and a magnificent church.

We were very impressed by the standard of clinical facilities and the ambitions of everyone we met, and compared the structure of small animal practice in our two countries at length. In Bucharest, for example, there are many small clinics with small staff numbers and limited culture of referral, perhaps reminiscent of UK small animal practice thirty years ago, but with access to advanced diagnostic techniques including CT, MRI and video endoscopy. Romania is a fascinating country, washed by the tides of European history over three millennia. The people are rightly proud of their long heritage and magnificent buildings, and keen to re-establish themselves as a successful country at the heart of Europe after some difficult times.”

Arrangements for the next group of exchange partners are underway with the winners of the 2017 FECAVA Travel Scholarship being announced at the FECAVA Congress in Vienna at the end of June.