Effectiveness of rural internships for veterinary students to combat veterinary workforce shortages in rural areas.

Veterinarians are a pivotal force in addressing animal health and welfare surveillance, with a critical role in improving public health security and increasing the profits of livestock farmers. Yet, the veterinary profession is adversely affected by personnel shortages, particularly in rural areas. Since the health of people, animals and their shared environment are interconnected in a One Health perspective, a set of policies are required to ensure public health by attraction and retention of veterinarians in rural areas. In France, a tutored internship programme, financially subsiding students and mentors to execute a training period in remote rural areas, was promoted to better integrate and retain veterinary students ending their veterinary training. This paper aims to evaluate how veterinarians' tutored internships influences students' choices for rural practice, using three different statistical methods derived from causal inference theory. Using survey data for the period 2016-2020, we show that: (i) the average effect of the tutored internship on veterinarians' work in food animal sector is not significant; and that (ii) the tutored internship leads veterinarians with a low share of work in the food animal sector to have a rural practise after they graduated between 13 and 20% greater than those who did not participate in the tutored internship.

Management of Digital Dermatitis in Dairy Herds: Optimization and Time Allocation.

The objective of this study is to determine the most effective time allocation for digital dermatitis management and to quantify the marginal economic gain from extra time devoted to digital dermatitis management. The model simulating foot disease occurrence and the associated management was Dairy Health Simulator©. Then, an econometric model was applied to identify the relationship between the dairy workshop's gross margin and time for lameness management as well as the hourly marginal gain curve associated with lameness management. The gross margin was optimized under two constraints, i.e., the overall time spent for lameness management and the mean lameness duration (mimicking cow welfare). The results show that allocating less time to lameness detection and more to footbath application can contribute as follows: (i) reduces time spent for lameness management, (ii) maintains the best welfare level, and (iii) obtains the highest gross margin. The optimal time to devote to footbath application ranged from 17.8 to 22.3 h/month. A hiring strategy was investigated, and the break-even point ranged from 16.1 to 19.8 h/month. The recommended time to spend on footbath application is relatively important; therefore, stakeholders should consider the importance of lameness to the dairy industry and should devote enough time for footbath applications.

Cost of lameness in dairy herds: An integrated bioeconomic modeling approach.

Foot disorders are costly health disorders in dairy farms, and their prevalence is related to several factors such as breed, nutrition, and farmer's management strategy. Very few modeling approaches have considered the dynamics of foot disorders and their interaction with farm management strategies within a holistic farm simulation model. The aim of this study was to estimate the cost of foot disorders in dairy herds by simulating strategies for managing lameness. A dynamic and stochastic simulation model (DairyHealthSim) was used to simulate the herd dynamics, reproduction management, and health events. A specific module was built for lameness and related herd-level management strategies. Foot disorder occurrences were simulated with a base risk for each etiology [digital dermatitis (DD), interdigital dermatitis, interdigital phlegmon, sole ulcer (SU), white line disease (WLD)]. Two state machines were implemented in the model: the first was related to the disease-induced lameness score (from 1 to 5), and the second concerned DD-state transitions. A total of 880 simulations were run to represent the combination of the following 5 scenarios: (1) housing (concrete vs. textured), (2) hygiene (2 different scraping frequencies), (3) the existence of preventive trimming, (4) different thresholds of DD prevalence detected and from which a collective footbath is applied to treat DD, and (5) farmer's ability to detect lameness (detection rate). Housing, hygiene, and trimming scenarios were associated with risk factors applied for each foot disorder etiologies. The footbath and lameness detection scenarios both determined the treatment setup and the policy of herd observance. The economic evaluation outcome was the gross margin per year. A linear regression model was run to estimate the cost per lame cow (lameness score ≥3), per case of DD and per week of a cow's medium lameness duration. The bioeconomic model reproduced a lameness prevalence varying from 26 to 98% depending on the management scenario, demonstrating a high capacity of the model to represent the diversity of the field situations. Digital dermatitis represented half of the total lameness cases, followed by interdigital dermatitis (28%), SU (19%), WLD (13%), and interdigital phlegmon (4%). The housing scenarios dramatically influenced the prevalence of SU and WLD, whereas scraping frequency and threshold for footbath application mainly determined the presence of DD. Interestingly, the results showed that preventive trimming allowed a better reduction in lameness prevalence than spending time on early detection. Scraping frequency was highly associated with DD occurrence, especially with a textured floor. The regression showed that costs were homogeneous (i.e., did not change with lameness prevalence; marginal cost equals average cost). A lame cow and a DD-affected cow cost €307.50 ± 8.40 (SD) and €391.80 ± 10.0 per year on average, respectively. The results also showed a cost of €12.10 ± 0.36 per week-cow lameness. The present estimation is the first to account for interactions between etiologies and for the complex DD dynamics with all the M-stage transitions, bringing a high level of accuracy to the results.

The gender wage gap in the French veterinary labor market.

Among the most important recent changes in the veterinary profession is the increasing percentage of women. Understanding trends driving the veterinary labor market is important to enable leaders in the veterinary profession and policy makers to plot strategic actions that will improve the profession. The objective of this paper was to estimate the gender pay gap in the veterinary labor market. We analyzed data from an anonymous online survey conducted in France in 2021 by the veterinary practitioner union. We assessed the gender gap pay using two regression approaches, ordinary least squares method and Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition, while controlling for all other variables (ceteris paribus). We provided evidence that male veterinarians earned wages approximately 9.3% higher (controlling for all other variables). This difference represented the "unexplained variance" that may be due to gender discrimination or unobserved characteristics.

Spatial evaluation of animal health care accessibility and veterinary shortage in France.

The decrease in the supply of veterinary healthcare in France adversely affects health of food-producing animals. In a One Health perspective, the health of people, animals and their shared environment are interconnected, and adequate supply of veterinary healthcare is required to ensure public health. Prevention of outbreaks and zoonotic diseases that may impact public health mobilizes a set of public policies, including strengthening veterinary workforce. These policies should be informed by quantification of animal health care accessibility, yet this has not been well characterized. The objective was to quantify the accessibility to veterinary healthcare for cattle, swine, and poultry sectors in France. A Two-Step Floating Catchment Area (2SFCA) approach was used to measure the level of accessibility to veterinary clinics. In the cattle sector, the 2SFCA score indicated relatively high accessibility in the north and south of France, but insufficient accessibility elsewhere. In the swine sector, there was high accessibility in the north east and in north of France, medium accessibility in the south west, and insufficient accessibility elsewhere. Finally, in the poultry sector, all regions had insufficient accessibility. Sensitivity analysis examining the effects of a change in spatial accessibility according to various travel time showed that the optimal threshold to compute 2SFCA score in cattle, swine and poultry sectors were respectively, 45, 60 and 60 min. According to a definition of "underserved area" derived from an official decree and the optimal thresholds to compute 2SFCA, the cattle, swine and poultry sector have on average 75.3, 89.9 and 98.3% underserved area, respectively. We provided evidence that the supply of animal health care was not sufficient and we proposed recommendations on how to assess animal health care accessibility, enabling modelling and visualization of the effects of potential public policies aimed at reducing veterinary shortages.