Our Aim

The Bristol Emergency Veterinary Service provides a premier emergency and critical care service to animals in Bristol and the surrounding area. We know that it is becoming increasingly difficult to balance the increasing demand for less out of hours for Veterinary and nursing staff with the increasing demand for high quality out of hours service for our clients. Our aim is to help bridge this gap by partnering local practices in the provision of emergency and critical care service. This scheme was launched in Spring 2002.

How does it work?

The service is tailor made to meet the individual requirements of each participating practice. The service is provided both on a regular basis or as a 'locum service'.

Services offered include:

Full provision of out of hours service.

We provide a full emergency out of hours service from 8pm to 8am (or hours to suit individual practices). This can be provided in the following manner:

1. Regular basis, (365 days of the year)

2. Week ends only

3. Week nights only

4. Single nights - this may be useful to fill gaps in your rota.

• All owners are asked to sign a declaration which explains that we cannot provide first opinion services within 12 months of their visit to us.
• Critical cases or those you wish to refer to our experienced small animal clinicians at Bradley Stoke or the Referral team kept in at your discretion.

Over night hospitalisation, including 24 glucose curves etc. As our clients continue to expect better and better service it is becoming increasingly hard to justify hospitalising critically ill patients overnight where it is not possible to have staff on-site. We are happy to hospitalise patients overnight and provide treatment as required. We have provided this service for several practices over the last 12 months and to date this has been received very well by both the vets and clients involved. We usually ask the client to transport their pet to and from our hospital. To date we have not charged participating practices for this service and clients have been charged our standard hospitalisation rates.

Phone answering service.

The phones are taken by Veterinary nurses who 'triage' the cases over the phone. They will offer first aid advice where required and field the non-emergency enquiries. If the nurses feel that a visit may be required they will contact your on-duty vet so they can liase with the client. If we are unable to contact your on-duty vet the client will be offered treatment at our emergency clinic. In this way we hope to avoid the 'the mobile you are ringing may be switched off' scenario that we all dread whilst on duty.