Getting In Touch With The Vets.

We do our best to make ourselves available and we understand that getting hold of us quickly is important to you. However, we cannot answer our phones all the time. The mobile numbers that we publish for the vets are work mobiles and we turn them off when we are not on duty. On normal weekdays, our phones are on from 8:00am to 6:00pm.

Here a few points to bear in mind when contacting us:

• Your primary way of getting hold of us should be by phoning us. We try as hard as possible to answer calls when we are on duty since we never know if a call coming in is an emergency. This does mean that you should get an answer quickly if we are available. If we are busy and unable to talk, we will often answer and ask you if it is urgent. If it is not, we will let you know that we will ring you back. On really busy days, we get dozens of phonecalls so if you have not heard back from us, please ring again since your number may get lost in a long call list.
• If we are unable to answer, our phone should have a message telling you to leave a message or ring the office on 01434 606033. If it is out of hours, you can access the duty vet by pressing ‘1’ when prompted. This will divert directly to the duty vet’s mobile.
• We are OK with texts but we cannot guarantee a rapid response. If we are not on duty, if we are driving, if we are in the middle of surgery or an emergency or if we are on holiday etc, we may not see your text for some time, and it may take a day or two to get back to you (or up to a year in the case of maternity leave).
• Please do not phone us on WhatsApp. There is no facility for us to leave a message and if we are not on duty you will not get a message telling you that. We will also not necessarily know that you tried to call us.
• Please bear with us. On really busy days we may get over 50 phone calls in a day. We simply cannot talk to everyone for 20 minutes – that would be 16hrs of talking! Please try to be brief and concise and we apologise in advance if we sound harassed at times!
• Please DO NOT use texts, Facebook or any other social media to call us out for emergencies.