Emergency
The emergency and critical care service is staffed with both specialist and non-specialist veterinarians with experience in dealing with pets with severe life-threatening illnesses.
Our patients benefit from our emergency team’s ability to provide rapid, effective and highest quality of care and treatment, by utilising our sophisticated diagnostic and monitoring technology and support including but not limited to:
- In house laboratory testing
- Continuous invasive and non-invasive blood pressure monitoring
- Temperature and humidity-controlled oxygen therapy
- Mechanical ventilator therapy
- Continuous ECG monitoring
- Central venous pressure placement and monitoring
- Advanced pain management
- Blood gas, oximetry and electrolyte monitoring
- Pulse oximetry
- End tidal CO2 monitoring
- Blood transfusion capability
- Peritoneal dialysis
- Point of care ultrasound
- Digital radiography
We deal with a whole range of problems including accidental poisonings, snake bite, tick bite, accidents, injuries, trauma, bloats, seizures, anaphylaxis, vomiting, diarrhoea, complications from chronic disease, pain, collapse, paralysis and coma.
The emergency service operates on a triage basis. When you first come into the hospital, your pet will be evaluated to determine how severe the problem is. If your pet has a severe life-threatening illness, he/she will not be made to wait. A stat form will be provided to give us permission to treat him/her immediately. The veterinarian will discuss further treatment and diagnostic required once your pet have been stabilised.
Cardiac arrest can happen in pets with severe life-threatening illnesses. Prompt CPR using a well research guideline and technique has been shown to improve outcome. All members of our team are certified RECOVER (Internationally recognised veterinary CPR guideline) practitioners and our Criticalists are RECOVER instructors.
Many cases presented for emergency consultations can be treated as outpatients. However depending on the severity and complexity, cases that are admitted to the emergency service can be discharged home, to the regular veterinarian or referred to another specialist after discussion with the owner and veterinarian.
Cases are discussed at hospital rounds and get feedback from or reassessed by other specialists. Each patient is not getting one specialist weighing in on the case, they are getting the whole team approach. It is not uncommon for our critical cases to be co-managed by 2-3 different specialists.
Our specialist criticalists are available for advice on cases for both the emergency veterinarians and local veterinarians. The critical care service accepts internal and external referrals.