Our service is operating on a week on week off basis, effectively halving a partner clinics on call rota. We have now started to offer full-time out of hours cover to clinics in Kent and East Sussex. We work closely alongside the daytime teams to provide a professional service, with a careful transition into covering the on call. We also offer to see cases that come in just before the member practice closes, to provide increased benefit to the vets who are not on duty that night. As well as covering the difficult hours, we feel that allowing vets to finish on time is an important part of our remit.
Case handover is vital and we help to provide a high level of ongoing care for the patients that we treat by communicating efficiently with our member practices. Clinical notes and invoices are with the member practice by the time they open in the morning. Our invoices are then re-billed so that the client receives an invoice that they are familiar with.
We care about your clients just as much as you do, as a large percentage of the messages we receive are advice calls, for which we do not charge. We also pride ourselves on call attendance times, with more vets covering a given geographical area, we can attend calls quicker when multiple emergencies come in at the same time. We have carried out a number of audits to monitor our attendance times since starting to give re-assurance to practices that we are achieving our target of attending all urgent calls within an hour.
Initial feedback has suggested that clinics also benefit from an increased number of follow up visits. This is partly due to the fact that we are keen for the member practices to carry out any extensive work up that the case needs.
For our current coverage please see the map under “where we cover”. We are constantly looking at future expansion of this service. If you would like any further information then please contact us.