Emergency Out of Hours Service

As you are aware due to the small personal nature of the Community Vets team and premises, we are unable to provide our own on site 24 hour emergency service. As such we share this service with 4 other practices and use the premises and 24 hours nursing staff provided by Green Pastures Veterinary Centre in Worle.

We have become aware that a few of our clients have chosen to contact Vale Vets in Portishead for emergency out of hours treatment. As a result Vale Vets have made contact with us to explain that they are very happy to see our patients out of hours and have offered our clients a more formal arrangement for emergency treatment.

This has prompted us to review our current out of hours provision. Richard and Helen will continue to be part of the emergency team based at Green Pastures (working one in five weekends) at least to the end of 2017. However, with the unpredictable daytime weekend motorway traffic and a Portishead emergency service being closer for many, we feel that it would be an advantage to offer our clients a choice of location for out of hours care.

As such, if you phone Community Vets out of hours you will continue to be transferred to our current out of hours service based at Green Pastures. However, from today, if for whatever reason you would prefer to use Vale Vets in Portishead, you will also now be able to phone 01275 847400 directly to access their out of hours service. All clinical notes from Green Pastures or Vale will be transferred back to Community Vets as occurs already. Both centres are happy to hospitalise critically sick pets for as long as necessary negating the need to transfer back to Community Vets for daytime care unless appropriate.

All emergency fees are to be paid to the emergency centre at the time of treatment.

We hope that the choice now available for the rest of 2017 will be an advantage and we would very much appreciate your thoughts and feedback on the out of hours service should you on rare occasions need to use it.

Yours Sincerely,

Richard and Helen.