A Visual Analogue Scale Exercise for Teaching Antimicrobial Selection in Veterinary Pharmacology: Tool Development and Initial Implementation

Veterinary students often find it difficult to select antimicrobial drugs for patients, likely because it requires them to consider multiple factors and there are frequently several possible options with a lack of a defined "correct or incorrect" choice. Our goal was to develop a teaching tool to engage the students through the decision-making processes associated with antimicrobial drug selection in cats and dogs, designed to align with the CBVE competency of explaining a justification. We developed a series of small animal case vignettes with a set of antimicrobial choices. The students use a visual analogue scale (VAS) to indicate the relative safety and/or efficacy of the drug in question; they also provide a written justification for their selection. Student responses are anonymized and downloaded for instructor review. The instructor categorizes the frequency of selections according to the labeled quartiles and displays the results as a bar graph during the classroom session and selects some written justifications for the class to view as a group. Practical considerations for tool implementation include considerations of the curriculum, time spent reviewing individual answers, and the tool's utility as a supplementary aid to foster more student discourse about topics in pharmacology. Overall, the VAS tool has the potential to aid in generating discussion in clinical contexts where there is not a single best answer.