One year on at Willows...

4 August 2010

It barely seems possible that it is now a year since we moved into our new state-of-the-art hospital.

It has been a busy year for Willows, as the number of patients we treat has increased and the new services that we are offering have proven popular. The numbers of staff in the practice have continued to rise, and further expansion in staff numbers is planned for later this year - our new Internship program involving four additional vets will start in October, and there are also plans to take on additional veterinary surgeons in the internal medicine, soft tissue surgery, neurology, imaging and anaesthesia departments. This planned recruitment has all been backed up by a significant increase in our numbers of veterinary nurses, veterinary nurse assistants, animal care assistants, reception and administrative personnel. We will have well over 100 staff by the end of 2010!

Despite these increases in staff numbers and getting used to our fantastic (but sometimes complicated!) new facilities, we have continued to aim to provide our clients and their pets with the highest levels and quality of care and service, and we will continue to do so.

We have exciting plans for enhancing our out-of-hours service later this year, and our levels of patient care will improve yet further as a result. From October we will have a vet as a well as a nurse awake all through the night, caring for our in-patients and providing an emergency service for our general practice clients. This is in addition to our existing specialist emergency referral service provision which takes place 24 hours a day, 365 days of the year.

We continue to develop the services we offer - a typical example is the significant additional investment we have made in keyhole surgery instrumentation, allowing us to increase the number and types of procedure which we can undertake using minimally invasive techniques. Other cutting edge advanced procedures we have carried out over the last year include complex imaging techniques, brain surgery, total hip replacement in a cat, the latest airway 'stenting' techniques for collapsing windpipe problems, and many more.

Wilows Specialist Team

Our staff continue to enhance their knowledge by undertaking additional training, and in addition we continue to provide continuing education for other members of our profession - for example, we have a further four evening Continuing Professional Development Forums planned later in the year. These meetings are provided for outside veterinary surgeons and nurses; we ran five of these in the Spring and Summer, and they proved extremely popular, with around 80 to 100 delegates attending each meeting.

We are all looking forward to the next year in our new hospital and the new challenges and achievements that it will bring. We thank those of you who have used our services for your support.

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