Biosecurity Assessment

I completed my first real practical assessment just before Christmas break.  It was on biosecurity and held out at Langhill farm.  There were three stations.  First you had to get your waterproofs and wellies on and head to a barn for the 'Gear Washing' station.  Then, you headed back, took off your waterproofs and went to the 'Hand Washing' station.  Lastly, was a short 'Oral Exam' on biosecurity.

Biosecurity is basically preventing the spread of diseases from people and animals.  There are enough diseases we can transfer to each other.  For instance, I could go to a farm, pick up the nasties from a cow, and if I did not properly wash and disinfect, I could go right home and give it to my dogs, or to the next farm and muck up a herd of cows.  So, it is a really basic, but extremely important concept.  Think: Foot and Mouth disease.  Bad stuff.  For this reason, they were very stringent on our technique.  We could get a total of 5 marks.  2 for gear washing, 2 for hand washing and 1 for the oral. You needed 3 out of 5 to pass.  If you failed any one part, you have to resit in late January.

Gear Washing: For this, we got suited up, and had a bucket of mud to paint on our partner's waterproofs.  When our names were called (went in pairs), we approached the washing station.  We were given an index card with a dilution problem written on it.  We were to work this out in our head so that once we had all of the gunk washed off and it was time to disinfect, we would have known how much disinfectant to add to our water in order to be effective.  Now, I'm no math genius, so this part was actually what I was most worried about.  Doing long division in my head while concentrating on getting me and my partner properly cleaned off, caused me to sweat a bit. We had 5 minutes to completely wash off, scrub ourselves, disinfect and then hose off.  My partner and I managed to do this just fine and then gave our answers for the dilution problem.  We both felt we received both marks for gear washing.

Hand Washing:  Hand washing sounds oh-so-common-sense-easy and for the most part, it is.  We had been given the proper technique a few months prior and if you practiced, it was a piece of cake.  There were a couple of things that if you forgot, you immediately failed.  One item would have been not thoroughly wetting your hands prior to applying soap.  I took my time with the procedure and felt that I did fine on it as I left.

Oral Examination:  This was performed in a room one-on-one with the assessor.  You were shown a slide of something and then asked a question and given 2 minutes to explain and discuss.  Mine revolved around a farmer getting ready to leave for holiday, having a contract sheep shearer come to the farm while he was gone and what advice I would give him for employing this shearer.  I felt it went very well.

We received our marks the last day of the semester.  I was very well pleased with my 5 marks.  A lot of my classmates got 4's (mostly due to not getting dilution correct), there were enough 3's to go around and some flat out failed.  I think we have 10 people who have to resit and I'm fairly certain it is mostly due to hand washing,  but not positive.  They will do fine.  It was our first live assessment, so some people may have gotten a case of the nerves and completely blanked out on something.

We have our first major exams coming up in February and I could vomit right now thinking about them.  I have to get my study-on big time.  I don't want to just eek by and I REALLY do not want to have to be here in August to resit anything.

Off to get ready and head out for a bit on this rather dreary day....yuck.

Over-N-Out