The Swine Medicine Education Center is dedicated to providing veterinary students and practicing veterinarians from across the United States and around the world with extensive hands-on experiences and education in swine health and production
Mission Statement
The mission of the Swine Medicine Education Center is to collect and synthesize the best practices for clinical swine medicine and to translate and disseminate those practices to stakeholders who can apply them to improve swine health, ensure pork safety, maintain sustainability, and conserve resources.
Impact
Since it was launched in late 2010, the Swine Medicine Education Center (SMEC) has continued to grow and broaden its impact. SMEC maintains active dialog with the swine veterinarians supervising health care for approximately 65% of the pig farms in Iowa. SMEC provides an average of 98,637 hours of student instruction annually. Highlights include training 651 VM4 students from 31 different universities, training 127 international veterinarians and pig production executives from 35 different countries, training 15 domestic veterinarians and training 79 swine stakeholders. SMEC is providing swine medicine lectures for the University of Tennessee, Kansas State University, Mississippi State University and the University of Wisconsin 3rd year required food animal medicine courses and has executed letters of intent to provide the entire swine medicine curriculum to Midwestern University College of Veterinary Medicine in Glendale, Arizona and Lincoln Memorial University in Harrogate, TN. SMEC established a swine medicine digital library in 2017 which now includes 101 videos and 1,378 minutes of instructional footage with 812 users for veterinary students, practicing veterinarians, clients and producers. In the 2019 calendar year, SMEC had 32 active research or fee-for-service projects.