Emergency Vet availability

[Selous]

Looking on as an outsider and owning no pets, I will give my observations.

A while ago, I gave my sister, who has no transport, a lift to the local Vets. her cat was rather I’ll, and completely off its food, this was during Covid and so we stayed in the car, not being allowed into the practice, we suspected it had to be put down, it was 11 years old, she had been previously been phoning the vet for an appointment.

After 20 minutes a female vet came out and collected the cat in its cat basket. she then took it inside for examination. After about 15 mins she returned and said they couldn’t really find anything wrong with it. I asked what my sister was to do?

The vet then asked if the cat had insurance, the reply was yes, to which the vets attitude changed totally. She said they could take the cat and transport it to another linked out of hours vets and monitor it overnight.

It was 4pm. By 11pm my sister received a call saying they had carried out a host of tests and the cat needed to be put down, they had conveniently managed to run up a near £800 bill in the process!

My sister had 3 cats, in my experience of this and a few other occasions, once “insurance” is mentioned, many of these practices jump on this to carry out scans, blood tests, injections etc etc to deliberately inflate the bill.

She was told that they could carry out chemotherapy on one 13 year old insured cat suspected of having cancer!….. she declined. I wonder how much money they would have made out of that pointless course of treatment, prolonging the cats misery in the process no doubt.

She has changed vets but found that as they are all corporately owned, they basically do the same thing. Their main aim seems to be, to make absolutely as much money as possible.

Unfortunately it is all too common for vets to offer a tiered standard of care depending on insurance cases. I believe this to be wrong as it is the client’s decision how they wish to spend their money or that of their insurance company. Every client should be offered the same treatment options at the same prices and be involved with the decision how best to proceed. I think this attitude has arises from a deep seated embarrassment in front line charging for services by employees, most of which will not be on any sort of profit related pay and probably won’t be aware of the running costs of providing the service. This has always been a problem for practices even before recent corporatisation and price rises. The difference being that the decision makers these days are never going to have to face up to a client and justify fees like a partner in a traditional practice would have done on a regular basis.

 

[wildfowler.250]

After 20 minutes a female vet came out and collected the cat in its cat basket. she then took it inside for examination. After about 15 mins she returned and said they couldn’t really find anything wrong with it. I asked what my sister was to do?

The vet then asked if the cat had insurance, the reply was yes, to which the vets attitude changed totally. She said they could take the cat and transport it to another linked out of hours vets and monitor it overnight.

It was 4pm. By 11pm my sister received a call saying they had carried out a host of tests and the cat needed to be put down, they had conveniently managed to run up a near £800 bill in the process!

This reads that the initial consultation,(£50?) didn’t give a definitive answer. But when further investigations were performed to get a desired answer, (totaling a cost of £800) this also wasn’t suitable?
I’m not going to say OOH care isn’t expensive but it’s comparing apples and bananas having a pet in a staffed hospital vs an inpatient in a first opinion practice where the place is unmanned over night.

It really doesn’t put vets up or down whether a pet is insured or not. You’re obliged to offer all treatment options regardless. There’s plenty of occasions where the bill is kept as low as possible / further investigations held off at the clients request but you don’t hear about this because it doesn’t sell a good headline.


Funnily enough, if folk on here were offered two similarly paid jobs but one with on call and one without, I know which one most would chose.

 

[Selous]

The OOH fees have increased because the OOH providers have to generate their own profit rather than there being cross subsidisation from the daytime work which is how it used to be. This does lead to issues where animals need transferring but you do at least get to see someone who has hopefully had a proper amount of sleep before their shift

 

[Cj1990]

24/7

If a member of the family falls ill, in extremis, I can always throw them into some A&E department.

Nice to know that the same was on offer for something that I actually cared about...

It is a well known fact that dogs will always develop critical, threats to life, at 'five past closing time' on a Friday night...

Or a bank holiday!

 

[Bo Diddley]

Well, we have changed practices to one that is small enough to offer old skool out of hours service like it was 20 - 30 years ago when none of them worked for massive organized firms that pick your pockets dry every time you walk through the door . But how long this practice will hold out before it's made an offer it can't refuse is anyone's guess.

 

[Bo Diddley]

I wasn't aware of that

Neither was I, I've stitched up plenty of minor cuts on dogs over the years