No two veterinary surgeries are exactly alike. Standards of animal care and welfare differ greatly throughout the industry. At Vetrica, even though our prices are very competitive, we refuse to compromise patient safety and welfare.
Patient safety and welfare is assured by the following 4 main features:
1. Drugs and Materials Used
The sole use of isoflurane, while it costs us more, improves patient safety because it is gentler on the heart muscle, and is more rapidly eliminated from the body than other agents.
The routine use of nitrous oxide provides intra-operative pain relief, which reduces the dose of other anaesthetic agents required.
Despite the higher cost, we only use synthetic suture materials which are more reliable, and have less potential for disease transmission than animal based ones.
All animals receive pain relief before an operation. This is more effective than waiting to see if the animal is in pain after an operation. The majority of animals undergoing surgery in the UK still do not receive any pain relief.
2. Patient Monitoring
All animals (where it is appropriate to do so) are monitored by pulse oximetry. This painless, non-invasive test provides accurate, reliable information as to how much oxygen is present in a patient’s blood. This provides an early warning that something is wrong during an anaesthetic, when there is still time to put things right.
3. Theatre Practice
Even though it would reduce our costs considerably, we never use rebreathing anaesthetic equipment. The chemicals used to allow rebreathing are caustic, and a tremendous potential source of problems. The composition of anaesthetic gas mixtures are much more difficult to assess than when using other types of apparatus. Rebreathing anaesthetic gas is fundamentally less safe than not rebreathing.
All operations are performed with the surgeon wearing sterile operating gloves. This reduces the potential for the introduction of infection at the time of the operation.
The use of pre-anaesthetic blood testing, especially for old or sick animals allows us to detect abnormalities that interfere with anaesthesia that would otherwise go unnoticed.
4. Vetrica Advanced Anaesthetics
Presented as an optional extra, the Vetrica Advanced Anaesthetics offer the greatest level of patient care, consisting of:
- Comprehensive pre-anaesthetic blood and urine testing.
- Propofol anaesthetic induction.
- Pre-placement of an intravenous cannula.
- Heart and respiratory monitoring.
- Intravenous fluid infusion during anaesthetic where required.
