Information for owners on overnight care of their pets

Where possible we try and treat your animals so that they can receive medications you can give at home, however, in some scenarios your pet may need to be admitted for overnight care with Donaldson’s Vets. The veterinary surgeons may deem this necessary if your pet needs to receive intravenous fluids or medication, potent pain medications or constant veterinary supervision. We are very fortunate to be able to offer our own out of hours service to our clients. This ensures you and your pets receive continuity of care, less travelling and access to all previous clinical history.

If your pet needs to stay overnight, they will be transported using one of our company vehicles to our 24-hour hospital on Somerset Road, Almondbury. The veterinary surgeon looking after your pet will inform the nursing team and the on-call vet about your pet and will discuss with them the treatment plan. The 24-hour hospital will have access to all of your pet’s previous veterinary history.

During out of hours the main hospital at Somerset Road is staffed by our night team, consisting of one night vet and three members of the nursing team.

The Somerset Road out of hour’s hospital has a range of facilities to enable your pet’s recovery to health and to make their stay as stress free as possible. We have separate dog, cat, and exotic wards. We also have an ICU for critically ill patients and an isolation ward for patients that may have contagious diseases. There is a potential that we may have a more serious isolation case already admitted, and in this situation, we may have to hospitalise in the normal wards and barrier nurse. Hospitalising a patient in isolation will incur a further cost.

We have large walk-in kennels with mattress beds for our larger dogs, vivarium’s for some exotic species and a quiet cat ward with cat hides to keep our feline patients calm. We have modern diagnostic facilities and patient monitoring equipment available at all times (except CT which is not available out of hours). We have the facilities to be able to perform emergency surgeries at any time of the night, however sometimes the veterinary surgeons might make the decision to stabilise your pet beforehand.

The night vet will receive a handover from the hospital vet at the beginning of the shift, update the clinical records throughout the night and handover the cases back to the hospital vet at the end of shift in the morning.

If you have any more questions about our out of hours emergency service, please ask any members of our team on 01484 421512.