Students of veterinary science (vet students) and veterinary nursing (nursing students) at the Faculty of Veterinary Science, University of Pretoria, will collaborate to facilitate rabies awareness in an informal settlement in the east of Pretoria called Plastic View. Both vet and nursing students do community engagement in their formal academic programme, and this year rabies prevention in Plastic View is our community engagement activity for World Rabies Day.
The residents of Plastic View have identified dog bites as a challenge in their community. Several children and adults have been bitten by dogs and the people are concerned about rabies. There are however many misconceptions about rabies and our students will set out to address this gap in knowledge.
This will be a participatory engagement in preparation for a later rabies dog vaccination campaign.
The nursing students will visit the site and engage with community health workers (CHWs) who are also residents in Plastic View. The nursing students and CHWs will learn from each other through dialogue and a walk through the settlement. The students will learn about life in an informal settlement, and also the lives of dogs, from the CHWs and will in turn share their knowledge about rabies prevention with the CHWs. The CHWs are part of the University of Pretoria's Community-Oriented Primary Care (COPC) programme.
Prior to this site visit, on World Rabies Day (28 September) the first-year nursing students will engage with third-year vet students to learn about rabies. During the course of this year the vet students have all completed the Rabies Educator and Animal Handling and Vaccinating Certificates and will have attended a talk by a GARC representative about rabies control.
In addition, the nursing students will have access to GARC rabies booklets ("Want a friend? Be a friend!") and show them to the CHW that they are assigned to in Plastic View. In the process of working through the book together with the CHW, they will explain the important principles of rabies prevention. Each CHW will receive a bundle of booklets to work through with families in Plastic View that have children of primary school age. CHWs are assigned to a certain number of families / households for whom they provide primary health care services. The engagement with our students will hopefully add a One Health perspective to the valuable work of the CHWs.
After their site visit, the nursing students will meet again with the vet students in small groups and share what they learned during their visit to Plastic View. The vet students (who are a much bigger class and cannot be accommodated in visits to Plastic View) can then use this information to complete their community engagement assignments in which they must propose a One Health / One Welfare solution applying dog population management principles for rabies control in Plastic View.
We trust that our small contribution will add to the many other activities globally to make this a successful 2021 World Rabies Day.