Important Notice re: Covid-19

Dear Clients,

As you know, Victoria has been placed into level 4 lockdown again for the next 5 days.

We are classed as an essential service, so this means you can still keep your appointment times if you have one booked between Saturday 13th February and Wednesday 17th February.

We will, however, need to return to our previous level 4 method of consulting which is contact-less. This means that when you come to the hospital the front door will be locked. A bell is located at the entrance, please press the button and a staff member will let you in. We will ask that you take your pet into one of the consult rooms and leave dogs on the floor and cats in their carriers on the table. We then ask that you exit the building and wait outside or return to your vehicle if you have one. It’s helpful if you write a short note and leave it on the table with the reason for your visit and the best number to call you on. One of our vets will then call and undertake a phone consultation with you. Payments will also be taken over the phone where possible.

As per the current guidelines, masks must be worn at all times when dropping off and picking up your pets.

If you would like to defer your consultation until such time you can be present with your pet, you may. Please call reception on 9689 9333 and we can work this out for you.

Hopefully this will only be for the next 5 days and we can get back to where we were starting Thursday 18th February!

At that point the following previous message still applies:

We were lucky enough to be classed as an essential service last year, so we’ve never had to cease servicing our clients and patients. We were, however, for a long period only able to see emergency and sick animals, so routine vaccinations, in otherwise well animals, were delayed. This has meant we have a very large backlog of routine consultations. We’re limiting the number of these we can do in a day, but we’re still finding that we’re booked ahead fully by 1 – 2 weeks due to the extra workload of all the catch up required. We also still need to maintain our 1.5m distancing in the consult rooms, which means that we need to take more animals out the back to be held by the nurses. This takes a little longer in every consult, so can’t fit quite as many consults in per day.

So we can have more control over the bookings, we have had to temporarily suspend the online bookings.

We have also decided we are unfortunately unable to take new clients for the moment. This is so that we can concentrate on servicing our current clients to the best of our ability with as little delay as possible.

We ask that everyone please be patient and kind to our receptionists and nurses, they’re doing their best to fit everyone in in a timely manner.

They’re also trying to triage patients so we can fit sicker animals in sooner.  But they can’t control how busy we currently are.

Thank you for your understanding and patience.

From all the staff here at SVH