Our Covid-19 Update

Covid Practice update 15th July 2021

We have thought long and hard as a practice about what to do as restrictions ease on the 19th of July.  We have really missed you being in practice, and we understand you would rather be in the consult room.  Our priority is making sure we can continue to provide veterinary care for your pets, and to do this we have to make sure our staff are protected as much as possible. We can’t offer our normal service if we have several members of staff isolating.  We had been hoping to allow you back in as of next Monday, but we have decided to continue with a cautious approach and ask clients to remain outside for now for the following reasons 

Our vets see a large number of clients every day.  If these clients were seen in the consult room, rather than outside that’s a lot of ‘close contacts who all pose a transmission risk to our staff and a risk of us being involved in a Track and Trace incident. 

We work in a relatively small space and are limited on ventilation because we can’t open our windows – the cats have a crafty knack of jumping!  It is impossible to maintain 2m distance between our staff when they’re restraining animals to carry out examinations and procedures.  This means the risk of transmission between our staff is much higher than in other industries where social distancing can be maintained.  So far, we are very proud we have had no incidents of transmission between our staff, and we’d really like to keep it that way. 

Some of our staff are still not double vaccinated – one is great but two is better and we really don’t want to put our staff at risk. 

Currently vaccination does not exempt you from having to isolate after a track and trace incident.  If a member of staff tested positive for Covid, it is likely that track and trace will require a large proportion of our team to self-isolate due to our close working practices.  This would mean we would have to close the practice to all but emergency situations, leaving you without the level of care you all deserve. 

Overall, we have decided it is in everyone’s interests to hold off on having clients back in the practice for just a little longer, especially with cases expected to rise rapidly. 

Please bear with us, enjoy the summer and we will hopefully see you back inside practice soon. 

Thank you everyone for your understanding 

All of the team at Vet on the hill