Your veterinary surgeon may recommend that your pet stays overnight or over the weekend at Severn Veterinary Centre (for instance in cases of emergency, to continue medical care or simply if a pet requires treatment that can’t be completed during the normal working day). We hospitalise animals at our Berkeley House branch in Worcester, where overnight care is provided by Vets Now. We may also recommend that your pet is hospitalised at Vets Now Coventry.
If considered fit to travel your veterinary surgeon may ask you to transport your pet – if the location is unfamiliar to you the receptionists at each branch will be only too happy to provide advice and directions.
Overnight care provided to inpatients by Vets Now is described in the Worcestershire section.
If your pet requires hospitalisation please remember this will incur additional fees, especially if frequent night time checks or treatment are required. Your vet will provide you with an estimate of hospitalisation charges and keep you updated as often as practically possible if additional or unforeseen costs are incurred.
Severn Veterinary Centre work alongside dedicated accident and emergency vets – Vets-Now – who work out of hours during nights, weekends and bank holidays. They are the UK’s leading Emergency Out of Hours provider with more than 50 practices all over the UK. Because they are so experienced and knowledgeable in emergency medicine, we trust them to look after your pet when we can’t be there.
In Worcester Vets-Now work out of our Berkeley House Surgery through the night from 7pm until 8am during the week and from 12:30pm on Saturday right through to 8am on Monday morning. During these times, Vets-Now will be taking good care of the pets staying with them, monitoring them regularly, as appropriate to their condition. They are able to provide immediate assistance should a pet’s condition deteriorate becoming unstable or critical, giving both us and you peace of mind.
If your pet has been admitted to Severn Veterinary Centre during the day and requires ongoing overnight hospitalisation as a stable patient, then they will be medically assessed by Vets-Now team at least every four hours to ensure that they are on track with getting better. At the evening rounds when patients are handed over from Severn Veterinary Centre to Vets-Now, a treatment plan is agreed for stable patients and is usually the plan set out by Severn Veterinary Centre. This plan will be followed unless there is a reason for concern e.g. your pet’s condition deteriorates. In this case the Vets-Now duty team will contact you in order to discuss decisions about changes to the treatment plan.
Pets that are considered unstable have conditions which are more likely to change and require checking more frequently. In these cases ongoing treatment is not easy to predict and decisions about changing their treatment plan are anticipated.
Unstable patients are also those with heavier nursing requirements such as paraplegic patients of profuse diarrhoea cases requiring frequent bedding changes.
If your pet is transferred to Vets-Now as a stable patient and the pre-determined plan is able to be followed there will be no additional charge from Vets-Now as the costs are covered by Severn Veterinary Centre hospitalisation fees.
If we recommend that your pet is transferred to Vets-Now as an unstable or critical patient Vets-Now will give you a detailed cost at the earliest opportunity once they have come on duty and taken over the care of your pet.
