As the year 2019 was approaching its end, the SOFTVETS project team met in Budapest for our 4th meeting. The get together started with a culinary team building, with members from Slovenia, Croatia and Budapest cooking a traditional Hungarian meal, from a hearty soup all the way to a strudel dessert.

During the next two days we got more serious and worked hard on all of the remaining intellectual outputs, „Soft skills” curriculum for implementation in veterinary higher education (IO2), Training concept for education of teachers involved in soft skills teaching (IO3), Evaluation tool for pilot implementation (IO4).

We were happy to host at the meeting dr. Claire Vinten, lead of professional studies office at Royal Veterinary College in London who has rich experience in curriculum building, so team members had a chance to discuss the biggest issues, such as differences in EU veterinary curricula and the optimal ways of building and delivering one.

Really important topic was also organisation of Teaching and training sessions for teachers of implementation partners (Zagreb, Ljubljana and Budapest) that will be held in February of 2020 with topics:

  1. Communicative Competences in Veterinary Medicine, Budapest, 12. -14. 2. 2019., prof. Birgit Hladschik-Kermer, Medical university Vienna, Vetmeduni Vienna
  2. Entrepreneurial Mindset Training, Zagreb, 7. – 9. 2. 2019., Tina Odinsky Zec, PhD, Zagreb school of economics and management; Rudolf Domotor, Vienna School of Business and Economics
  3. Teacher training workshop on innovative approaches to teaching and learning with ICT, Ljubljana, 3. – 5. 2. 2019., prof. Jože Rugelj, University of Ljubljana

We are also very happy that this years’ Graz Conference held on 16th – 18th April is themed ““Teaching life skills in medical education” and is being organised by our partner, University of Veterinary Medicine in Budapest. The project team will work hard with them to ensure top European lecturers and experts take part. We will also use the opportunity of gathering experts in the field to discuss and evaluate our intellectual outputs with important stakeholders.

Budapest offered us a beautiful working setting where you can feel both tradition and forward thinking come together. We’re looking forward coming back to this Veterinary University.