Our emergency service is designed to serve as an extension of your practice, providing 24/7 emergency and critical care. Our ICU serves Melbourne’s inner suburbs but also accepts cases from regional Victoria. We provide advanced care by a specially-trained team of veterinarians and nurses using state-of-the-art equipment for patients with serious medical problems. We typically have phone access to Dr. Merrin Hicks (residency-trained emergency and critical care) on a 24/7 basis to consult on the treatment of very complex or critical patients. Our doctors regularly attend CE, including weekly rounds and case review, directed at improving and maintaining skills specific to the emergency and critical care field.

You may elect to refer a patient to our emergency service for any of the following reasons:

• A client has an emergency with their pet outside of your regular office hours.
• A patient requires an examination or surgical procedure at a time that is impractical or inconvenient for you and your staff; for instance, a client seeks immediate care yet your schedule is already full. By referring these cases to our hospital you can rest assured that the patient will be well cared for and that the client will remain your client for future care.
• You feel a patient requires intensive care or monitoring, including 24-hour case supervision.
• A patient requires advanced life-support equipment such as continuous oxygen administration, ventilation, or blood pressure monitoring.
• A patient requires or may require administration of blood products or constant rate infusion drug therapy.
• You would like to have an advanced diagnostic procedure such as Doppler color flow ultrasound, video endoscopy, bone marrow biopsy, CT scan etc. performed by an internal medicine specialist as soon as possible.
• You would like to refer a client for evaluation or possible emergency surgery by our board-certified surgical specialist, Dr. Chris Preston.
• A client prefers that his or her pet receive overnight post-surgical or post-anaesthesia monitoring and supervision of potential or realized complications and/or pain management.
• A patient is recovering from surgery or anaesthesia and you recommend overnight monitoring for patient safety.

If a client requests immediate care at our facility during regular business hours, and identifies you as their regular vet, we will direct the client to contact you to determine if he or she can be seen at your practice. If the client has no regular vet, we may see the case but recommend that future care be performed with a regular vet. We then provide a referral to a regular vet based on their home address.

Clients seen by our emergency service are typically advised they must pick up their pets on weekday mornings. If one of your client’s pets under our care is stable but requires continued care, the client is asked to transfer the pet to your hospital. In such cases our emergency vet will attempt to call you regarding the transfer. Records for all discharged patients are promptly faxed and emailed to your hospital.

If a patient is too unstable to safely transport to your practice on a weekday morning, or if a client specifically requests ongoing 24-hour care, we will continue care at our facility while promptly faxing records to you to keep you abreast on the case. If it appears that a patient may require a complex surgery, endoscopy, ultrasound or CT scan we will make every effort to contact you (typically in the morning) to discuss the case and determine your preferences for case management. Obviously, the final decision regarding case management is made by the client.

Whenever possible, we strongly encourage clients to discuss their pet’s condition directly with you, their regular vet. We cannot, nor do we intend to, replace the important ongoing relationship and trust between you and your clients. We routinely advise clients seen by our emergency service to follow up with their regular vet during regular business hours rather than returning to our facility.

Some clients with hospitalized pets indicate they are unable to transfer their pets to their family veterinarian on weekday mornings due to work schedules or other time conflicts. In these cases we typically offer the client the option of having one of our staff transport the pet provided we have sufficient staff who can do this. We charge only a minimal fee for this service (which is paid in full to our staff member to cover his or her time) as our goal is to return stable cases to you, our referring veterinarian, and to make this transition as easy as possible for the client.