Celebrating 20 years of lifesaving care: Vets Now Telford marks milestone anniversary

From a critically ill Great Dane so huge it could barely be lifted onto the table to a cat choking on a six-inch-long, sausage-like hairball, the Vets Now Telford clinic has seen countless worrying emergencies.

Add in a festive epidemic of mince pie-eating dogs that used up every last drop of medicine and a request from police to X-ray a dog for crime scene evidence and there’s barely been a moment to stop and reflect.

Now, the clinic which has cared for thousands of often desperately sick animals is marking its milestone 20th anniversary.

It was back in 2005 that the Shropshire lifesaver opened its doors, and vet Karen Booth and Principal Nurse Manager Fiona Scrimshaw have been there every step of the way.

For Karen, originally from Australia but returning to work after maternity leave having been working at a daytime practice in Shropshire before, moving to a specialist emergency and critical care clinic was a real step into the unknown.

“I was working at a surgery and on farms, and you’d be called out to cases in the middle of the night just hoping you’d get back to your bed at some stage,” said Karen.

“You’d often be tired the next day but still expected to perform and do your very best for clients. Being in the Vets Now dedicated emergency out of hours clinic rested and ready for patients was mind changing and a real privilege.”

The Telford clinic, which was initially Wellington-based at Haygate Veterinary Centre but is now at Gladstone Vets in the Hadley shopping centre, is one of more than 60 Vets Now emergency clinics and hospitals all across the UK.

As the UK’s leading provider of pet emergency care, the specially trained staff have cutting edge veterinary equipment to deal with every kind of out-of-hours case, when daytime veterinary practices are closed.

Karen adds: “Think of us as an A&E for pets. Just like in a people’s hospital, our doors are open to everyone, but we also work with local daytime vet practices around the area – our partner practices. So if you call your usual vet in an emergency and they’re closed, you’ll be directed to us in the evenings, at weekends and on bank holidays - creating a seamless, 24-hour care model for pets.”

But while they now see over 200,000 pets a year, such emergency clinics were in their infancy in 2005, and Fiona recalls very different times.

“Emergencies were what you did between the bread and butter of spays and vaccinations,” said Fiona. “It was almost as if they were an interruption to your day. But those cases are what we here for, although I remember it being really quiet that first night as no one knew to get in touch.

“One of our vets had just come back from London and he brought in Krispy Kreme donuts. They were a novelty and that was about as exciting as it got.”

The cases soon started to flood in as word spread about how the clinic was always there when pet owners’ own vets were closed, but Telford was just starting to gear up to the sort of high tech clinic it is today.

“Now we have so many sophisticated pieces of kit, like blood machines that give lots of information instantly to change what we do,” said Karen. “We can work out straight away if there’s a clotting problem and there are other machines that are just incredible and give us so many facts and figures at our fingertips.

“And we have medication that acts instantly and can stop an animal squealing in pain, which is horrible for it and distressing for everyone to hear.

“We did have some things in the early days that might only have been available in America or a big university, but I still remember the excitement of getting a hydraulic treatment table that you could adjust to different heights.”

The adjustable table would have come in useful in the early days for dealing with the 90kg Great Dane with a potentially deadly stomach condition who Karen and Fiona managed to lift up onto the table to be operated on.

“It still amazes me how we did it,” said Karen. “It was probably sheer determination, but we did manage to operate and happily the operation went well.”

One night, we cared for a cat who had one of the biggest hairballs we have ever seen stuck in its throat and had gone blue.

And they still recall being asked by the police to do an X-ray to look for a grisly find a dog may have wolfed down at the scene of a fatality.

“Because we are open right through the festive period while most vets are closed, we are always incredibly busy then,” said Fiona. “We had one Christmas when we had about 10 dogs come in one after another having eaten mince pies (raisins can be incredibly toxic for dogs).

“We have to make them sick straight away, but there were so many we had used up our full stock of the drug we use.”