Emergencies

For nearly 40 years The Barn Veterinary Practice has provided our own out of hours service to our clients, meaning our vets work long shifts, often late into the night, then work a full day the day after. As nearly all veterinary practices have moved away from this way of working, we have seen an influx of clients using our services. Unfortunately, this has led to an unsustainable workload for our team. Many of our clients will know that in the past The Barn has had a high turn over of vets, often relying on newly graduated vets to fill vacancies. This has been largely due to the pressures of providing our own out of hours service, despite us being immensely proud of doing so.

Next year, two of our vets are retiring, so to cope with our workload, we need to recruit new vets. Due to huge shortage of vets in the UK, recruitment is incredibly challenging, with many local practices enduring long periods of understaffing. The Barn has been incredibly lucky to have been fully staffed with experienced vets for several years now. However, recruiting an experienced vet, willing and able to work during the day and out of hours is not something we as a practice or our local colleagues have been able to do for many years. We have seen the impact recruitment difficulties have had on neighbouring practices and their clients, and do not want to replicate it. So, to continue being able to provide the best service and maintain availability for all our clients, we have taken the proactive but difficult decision to stop providing an in-house out of hours service.

We feel that to maintain high levels of clinical standards, a well-rested and fully staffed team is essential.

We appreciate this will be a big change for many of our long-standing clients but hope everyone will appreciate the decision has been made for the good of our patients, our clients and our staff.

We will continue to provide routine appointments 7 days a week, at times convenient to our clients. Outside our opening hours, emergency cases will be seen by a Vets Now, a dedicated out of hours emergency clinic based in Kesgrave. We feel that moving our out of hours provision to an external provider, will have minimal negative impact to our clients, but potentially large benefits to patients seen during the day. The emergency clinicians based at Vets Now are highly trained in emergency medicine, well rested and best suited to deal with any out of hours emergencies.

We plan on keeping as many of our hospitalised patients on site as possible during the week, if it is appropriate for their individual needs. This will minimise the number of patient transfers needed. As ever, we will discuss options with owners on a case-by-case basis.

We sincerely thank you for your understanding and support for our team.