Good day. Dominic Belfield here and this is the obviously clinical podcast. Thank you for listening.

Thank you for subscribing on a smartphone or generic fruit brace device.

Really grateful for you taking the time to download and listen to this obviously podcast.

We don't ask much from return, but be incredibly grateful if you could pop to Apple Podcast or ACAST or wherever you actually listen to this podcast and leave us a review.

Obviously a five-star review would be great. But if you could take a couple of minutes your time to do that, that would be fantastic.

So today, joining myself in the studio, we have Mary De la Casas, who is one of the postgraduate

deans at the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons. Do I get that right?

You did. Well done. Thank goodness for that. Thank you, Mary, for joining it.

So I suppose the, maybe the first question is that what is the, what is the, what is the PDP?

So the PDP is, it stands for, PDP stands for professional development phase and it's something

that was set up by the RCVS and to support graduates as they make that transition

from undergraduate life at university into their postgraduate life and at work

and so I always I find it easier when people ask me what is PDP to sort of start by, I think,

sort of talking about why we have PDP. So when I graduated back in 2003, I was, you know,

you're sort of given your degree certificate and off you go into practice and they're just like, off you go, have fun, enjoy. And there was really no, there's no sort of given your degree certificate and off you go into practice and they're just like off you go have fun

enjoy and there was really no there's no sort of structured support for new graduates and there was no

there's no sort of list of skills that you know we thought we should be aiming towards there was no

time scale that we you know we were given you know this is a time scale on which you should be attaining these certain skills.

So there really wasn't any structure there to that period of time.

So in the year 2000, there was a review of veterinary education done and it was found that there was a real need and a real want for a more structured process to be sort of put in place at that time in someone's career.

And particularly sort of when you compare it to careers such as medicine or dentistry where there was, there was a, you know, a process in place for that time in someone's career.

So yeah, so they really just found that new graduates wanted some sort

...