According to NICE (2015), ‘case scenarios are an educational resource used for individual or group learning’, encouraging students to ‘improve knowledge of the systems and processes involved in medicine and their applications in practice’. Simulation-based medical education allows trainees to learn from mistakes without causing harm, enhances clinical competence, and forms part of the NHS Improvement programme.

Similar opportunities are lacking in veterinary medicine. CasePALs aims to collate a bank of real-life clinical veterinary case-based scenarios, accessible by all veterinary students, with three objectives:

1. To expose students to case scenarios with high fidelity to reality.
2. To encourage self- and peer-to-peer learning by empowering final year students to select the ‘case of the week’, based on cases they feel offer particular educational benefits. This will be an anonymised real case from the hospitals/clinics, chosen based on existing small group teaching discussions, and moderated by senior clinicians before transfer to the website. The current client consent form gives consent for the use of clinical information for this purpose. Each scenario will include background information and a series of questions to be considered before referring to the multimedia answers, allowing students to ‘manage’ the patient from presentation to discharge.
3. To encourage participation of all year groups, allowing clinical scenarios to be embedded in the teaching curriculum from day 1. Each week, the previous case will be filed in an accessible bank according to discipline (eg. cardiology, orthopaedics) and difficulty (easy, moderate, difficult), allowing case selection based on the body system being studied, or the year of study.