06/13/2021
To our amazing friends, supporters, and clients. We are writing to you because of a few concerning trends that we have been experiencing here at the emergency clinic and we want you all to know that we care deeply about each and every patient and client we see. We want you to be sure that when you are waiting for your pet to be seen and you see someone else’s animal get brought inside first that they are not just skipping the line and that we did not forget about you. We pride ourselves on our patient care and compassion and we think that shows in our outcomes and client reviews.
Here are a few things that we are not:
1. First Come First Serve. As an emergency center we intake critical patients continuously and often without advance notice. Clients with animals who arrive after you and get seen before you are being triaged because they are in critical condition. These patients will not survive without urgent treatment that comes before other more stable patients. Sometimes we have multiple critical patients at the same time, and that same triage system helps us guide where to focus our immediate efforts and which patients can wait a bit longer. These are the unfortunate conditions of a finite resource, and we work very hard every shift to balance our capabilities with the needs of our patients and clients.
2. Worthy of beratement. Our staff, from receptionists to technicians to doctors, come to work to help patients and their owners. We understand that the circumstances which bring people into our facility are never ideal and often stressful, and that people handle stress in all different ways. However we will no longer tolerate or excuse verbal or threatened physical abuse from a client while in the course of treating their pet. Anyone who violates this policy will be referred elsewhere
3. Perfect. We make mistakes sometimes as we are human. Sometimes while we are all hands on deck inside we don’t tell our waiting clients that they will be waiting a long time. We know your time is valuable and we do our best to keep people updated but we recognize that we fall short sometimes. We are very welcoming of constructive feedback from our client’s experiences in an effort to continually improve the service we provide.
4. “Cheap”. We provide high quality advanced medicine when everyone else is closed, this is expensive to do. There is a cost to attract highly capable staff to work nights and weekends, there is a cost to stocking specialty medicines so that when an emergency arises we have exactly what a pet needs, and while we pride ourselves on our relatively low prices we understand that this is still a huge burden for our clients. We try to come up with alternatives when clients need them, and we are open and honest about how these alternatives will work. We wish that money truly was no object, but we, like everyone else, unfortunately do not live in that world
We love our community and we hope to be there for you when you need us. Please just keep in mind that we are all human, and we are all here to help your pet and you. Please be kind.
