In this post, students Kimberlee Ten and Juliette Remillat-Scarpa, from Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies, describe how they used Student Partnership Agreement funding to improve community outreach for All4paws. All4 paws is a student-led charity, which provides veterinary treatment for cats and dogs belonging to homeless and vulnerably housed individuals. The post belongs to the Student Partnership Agreement 2024 series.
All4paws is a student-led charity that aims to help homeless and vulnerably housed individuals in Edinburgh. With supervision from qualified clinicians, we provide first line veterinary treatment to their dogs and cats. This includes but is not limited to preventative health care, microchipping, routine health checks and more. We also have an emergency fund used for complex procedures and emergency treatments that are beyond the scope of our service. In addition, we collect donations of basic needs like food, bedding, coats and toys to provide to our patients.
The clinics are organised by the veterinary students, and we also run various fundraising events to continue offering our vital services to the community. As students, we are able to obtain a greater understanding of what it takes to run a vet clinic, increase our confidence in making clinical decisions especially with a shelter medicine focus, and gain valuable experience on interacting with clients.
All4Paws has been running since 2009, having evolved from pop-up clinics in hostels to gaining our own premise in 2022. We hope to continue the development of our organisation to preserve its longevity and progressively improve the standard of care to our clients and patients for many years to come.
This year, we wanted to achieve two main goals with the funds awarded to us by the Student Partnership Agreement. These goals carry the overarching aim of improving community outreach.
1. Interactive workshops
Firstly, we wanted to offer interactive workshops to the general vet student body. These would combine our existing premise and equipment, along with the wealth of knowledge earned by our committee members and volunteer vets, to help other vet students develop foundational clinical skills and improve their confidence to practice veterinary medicine. However, this would require additional materials to use in these workshops, such as ultrasound gel, suture material and cytology slides. The cost of medical materials is quite high, and we could not have sustainably hosted multiple workshops throughout the year without the help of external funding.
We were able to host several very popular clinical workshops with the help of Dr. Gardiner. These consisted of three rotating stations such as the clinical exam of a dog, interactive ultrasound practice on live animals, suture patterns, and clinical case discussions. We received an overwhelmingly positive response, with the feedback focusing on the hands-on aspect that we offered. All of our workshops have been oversubscribed and we had a waiting list of vet students wanting to join. The success of our workshops has allowed us to connect with students of all years to hopefully inspire them to join our committee or create their own individual fundraisers to support All4Paws.
2. Increase awareness of All4paws
Our second aim was to increase awareness of our organisation to vulnerably housed individuals of Edinburgh. To help as many under-served pets as possible, this requires a strong awareness of All4Paws in the homeless and vulnerably housed community. This can be very difficult as a large portion of the community does not have access to a mobile device or reliable internet signal. We wanted to organise hostel visits to meet some more vulnerably housed individuals with pets who would be interested in our services, want to ask questions about how we operate and to start to develop some trust and transparency in us.
Prior to All4paws having a premise, we used to do pop-up clinics at various hostels, which had the advantage of us going to the clients. Now that we have our own premise, it creates a new barrier for our clients who often live quite hectic lives, as they must now find the time and money to make the trip out to us. We felt that organising regular hostel visits would make us more approachable and keep us in-touch with the community of people that we serve. Our committee was able to perform a few hostel visits – we brought them food, a large amount of dog toys, treats, leashes and other pet accessories that have been donated to us throughout the year. This has been met with a lot of warmness from owners, appreciating the effort of us going to them, and we are really pleased to have started regular visits as part of our schedule. We were also able to educate the owners on preventative medicine, and are seeing more of their faces in our clinics to get essential vaccinations and de-worming treatments.
Overall, we feel that the Student Partnership Agreement fund has allowed us to create closer links with our clients and the vet school community. It increased the impact we had on the local Edinburgh community and allowed us to offer the opportunity for more students to get involved in charity work.
Following the success of our events, we have already organised more hostel visits for the upcoming months, set up a workshop for the next school term and have created sub-committee roles to ensure we have designated people who are focused on organising events like these. All4Paws is very pleased to see the impact of our two new additional components this year, and we are super excited to continue this for the coming year!
The project team consisted of:
- Kimberlee Ten (student)
- Celest Oon (student)
- Seonhu Jeon (student)
- Juliette Remillat-Scarpa (student)
- Andrew Gardiner (staff member)
Read previous Teaching Matters blog posts about All4Paws:
- All4Paws: Vet students at work in the community
- All4Paws – establishing ourselves in our new premises
Relevant links
Head to our website: all4paws
Read about how we’re having a social impact at the UK’s most sustainable university: QS sustainability ranking
Follow All4paws on:
- Instagram: @all4pawsedinburgh
- Facebook: @All4Paws
- X: @all4pawsedi
Juliette Remillat-Scarpa
Juliette Remillat-Scarpa is one of the senior fundraising coordinators for All4paws and is in her 4th year at Edinburgh veterinary school. She, along with the help of other committee members, organises events to raise money for the charity and to enable the continuation of projects noted above.
Kimberlee Ten
Kimberlee Ten is an All4Paws senior fundraising coordinator, currently in her final year of vet school at R(D)SVS. Her role entails contacting various organizations for the fundraising events and leading the junior committee members. Kimberlee loves all aspects of veterinary medicine, especially shelter medicine and wildlife.
