Investing In patient care

Our new wards and diagnostic imaging room are up and running! It's been just over a year now since Graeme and Jocelyn bought the practice.  Our plan is to slowly upgrade aspects of the surgery over the next 5 years. Development of our new patient wards and diagnostic imaging room started in early August 2008.  The building work is now complete. 

If you would like to take a look around ask at reception and we will show you if we can (it depends on what procedures are being carried out in the hospital at the time).

The chance to redevelop a section of the hospital came about when we relocated the administrative side of the practice upstairs.  This left us with a room that has for a year or so filled many different uses including a storeroom or a temporary cat ward if we had noisy dogs in for the day. 

This room has been divided into 3 areas. An isolation ward, a cat ward and a diagnostic imaging room for xrays and ultrasound. A tight squeeze at times as the rooms are small but very functional.

The Isolation Ward

The ward has 3 kennels that can board anything from a large dog to a rabbit. Patients with infectious disease (like cat flu or parvovirus) can be isolated in this ward and managed without placing other patients at risk.  We have always taken special precautions to separate contagious animals by following nursing protocols that minimise spread of disease.  Having a separate ward for these patients improves our ability to do this and minimises disease transmission by having separate drainage, ventilation and air conditioning.  The need to separate patients into isolation is infrequent but an essential part of offering a safe patient focused hospital environment.

The cat ward has always been top of our wish list.  Most of the practice staff own cats and we pride ourselves on being a feline friendly practice.  Cats get easily stressed by the unknown and by noise.  A cat recovering from surgery or illness needs to feel secure which is the last thing they do with noisy dogs next door.   In the past we have had to use temporary cages and move cats around the practice to suitable rooms if we had barking dogs in the kennels. 

At last we have a cat ward, large enough to house 8 cats comfortably, that is quiet and air conditioned.  We decided early on that we did not want the small cat cages common in hospitals (we have 2 small cages pictured right).  These cages are large enough for a cat, a litter tray and food bowls but it leaves the cat very little room.   They are fine for outpatients but not for cats that need to stay for a while.





We have a couple of cages (left)  that are 1.2m wide and 70cm deep giving cats plenty of room to move.  Cats don't like to eat next to their litter trays and small cages force this on them.  These cages can be subdivided into 2 units each if we need the space.  We have shelves for the cats to sit on and all the units are raised off the floor to make cats feel more secure.

The Diagnostic Imaging Room
  For the last 3 years we have used an X-ray machine that has the latest technology allowing us to take the quality x-rays we need to make a diagnosis.  Our problem has been that the x-ray unit has been sited next to our surgical theatre and with new legislation governing radiation we have been unable to simultaneously operate and take x-rays in the room next door.  We have used a wet chemical development process which has been temperamental at it's best.  Wet chemistry is hazardous, the chemicals are dangerous and the process is prone to error which means the x-rays sometimes don't come out properly leading to repeated x-rays and a longer sedation or anaesthetic for the patient.  The chemicals are toxic to the environment and need special processing to make them safer.

We decided to move the x-ray and ultrasound to a purpose built room and at the same time migrate from wet chemistry to digital processing.  This room is completely lined with lead sheets for health and saftey reasons.  Gone are the x-ray viewers of old and in their place is a large LCD screen. 

The consistent high quality x-rays and diagnostic detail we get from this system keeps suprising us.  Our patients will certainly benefit from this investment and we can also refer images more easily to specialists by posting cd's or sending emails.

Our high definition digital ultrasound system plugs into the same computer as the digital x-ray unit and it has been upgraded to allow us to diagnose heart disease in more detail.  It will take time to learn the new skills required from the upgrade but we can finally measure pressure gradients in the heart and work out how fast blood is flowing between certain areas, a very useful procedure when trying to diagnose different heart diseases.