CSU's Pacific Paravet Training project strengthening biosecurity across the region

The Pacific Paravet Training project has been running since 2020 and has worked to help upskill and support workers in Timor Leste, PNG, Solomon Islands, Fiji and Vanuatu.

The courses were delivered through the EdApp training app, which was developed to support the limited number of veterinarians in the region and in the last week CSU held a final in person workshop where the training courses were officially handed over to 27 representatives from the project's country partners.

A practical postmortem training involving fish, pigs and chickens was part of the final workshop used to sharpen the participants technical skills.

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Senior Research Fellow and Project Manager for the Pacific Paravet Training Project Dr Nicola Wunderlich said the project brought vital skills development to vets in the region.

"We have developed these online training resources over three years together with our Pacific partners and are proud to find a sustainable solution that offers training resources freely available to all," Dr Wunderlich said.

Participant Tanya Areori, a regional veterinary officer from PNG, said her country is short on vets and this project provides a vital training opportunity for local aspiring animal workers.

"My role here is to learn how to use the platform ... and then be able to take that platform and bring it back to PNG and use it for training," she said.

"The program provides that global standard and through the platform we can train our staff to equivalent standards. In PNG we only have three national veterinarians and over 9 million people.

"By having this training available we can train a lot more people."

Project lead and CSU associate professor of wildlife health and pathology Andrew Peters said the project will strengthen biosecurity across the pacific and beyond.

"This is critical for all the countries in the region including Australia, which is why Australia has historically supported bios security capacity building in the region," he said,.

"Firstly, it allows people on the ground in the pacific to detect things earlier and to know what to do.

"And the second thing is it builds relationships so they can reach out and connect across the region when a problem emerges."

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