What’s new at Companion Pet Care of Littleton, Inc.

As of August 22, 2011, we began using the services of Littleton Area Veterinary Emergency Service for after-hours care of our patients and clients.  They are just down the road from us at 59 W. Main Street, and can be reached by phone at 603-444-5533.  They are fully staffed for emergencies, and are open between the hours of 5PM and 8AM on weekdays, and 24 hours a day on weekends and holidays. We are so excited to have them here!

After serious consideration, Dr. Winter has decided that the emergency needs of our very special clients and patients will be best met in the future by referral to a specialized, 24-hour emergency clinic.  We have chosen Winnipesaukee Veterinary Emergency Center at 8 Maple Street, Suite 2,  in Meredith, NH, to provide that emergency care for our patients.  They can be reached at 603-279-1117.  Click here for directions.  Several of our clients have already traveled there for emergency care, and have been very pleased with the caring treatment they and their pets have received.

The decision to change our emergency procedure was a difficult one, and we did not make it lightly.  We have been very pleased with the care our patients have received from our local colleagues over the past several years.  We know that the distance to Meredith will almost certainly be farther than clients have traveled in the past for emergency care; however, the amount of time elapsed between your initial call and your pet being seen by the doctor will very likely be the same or shorter than it has been.  When you call, you will reach WVEC immediately, and will be assisted in making the decision to travel for emergency care.  You can then head south, and arrive at the emergency clinic in roughly an hour.  If you know that your pet needs to be seen on emergency, you can simply get in the car and start driving to Meredith, and call them on the way to let them know you are coming.

Another advantage is that there will now be only one place you will have to go for emergency care.  You won’t have to wonder whether it will be St. Johnsbury, Danville, Ryegate or East Haven on any given night.  You will also receive the care of a veterinarian whose primary purpose is to provide after-hours emergency care, and who already on-site, awaiting your arrival.  The vet and staff will be well-rested, and able to provide the same kind of care you would expect from the staff at Companion Pet Care during the day.

Because the travel distance will be greater in some cases, we do encourage all of our clients to call our office as early as possible during the day when you suspect that your pet is ill enough to be seen that day.  We will be making every effort to squeeze in sick pets throughout the day, and will be offering convenient drop-off appointments for our established clients.  If you come home to check on your pet at noon and find him or her to be sick, please don’t wait until you come home after work at the end of they day to call.  We will be much more likely to be able to accommodate you if we hear from you earlier in the day.

Please note the new hours on our homepage.  Dr. Billie has made what she has described as a “quality-of-life” decision to close the clinic on Saturday mornings.  With two little kiddos at home, she feels that being away from them every day of the work week, and Saturday mornings as well, is just too much.  After investigating the situation, and realizing that virtually all other professional offices are closed on Saturdays, and almost all of our own veterinary emergency call group as well, she decided that it would help her provide better quality of care during the week if she closed on Saturdays as well. 

Never fear, though.  We have made some accommodations for our clients who cannot get away from work during the week for routine wellness care for their pets.  We have decided to stay open late on Wednesday evenings so folks can come after work if needed.  We will be in the office until 8PM on Wednesdays, and will be seeing many of our normal Saturday patients for scheduled appointments in those evening time slots.  We will occasionally have Saturday hours, on Saturday mornings that we are on emergency call for our call group.  If you need to schedule a wellness appointment for a Saturday morning, please call the office to find out when the next available Saturday appointment might be.

Our emergency call group, which includes our clinic, St. Johnsbury Animal Hospital, Dr. Steen’s Animal Hospital, North Country Veterinary Clinic, Danville Animal Hospital, Ryegate Small Animal Hospital, and East Haven Veterinary Clinic, is available to see emergency cases on Saturday mornings, just as it is on Saturday afternoons and Sundays. 

As always, we reserve appointments during the day for sick patients belonging to our regular clients, and we can arrange for convenient drop-off appointments for established patients.  For those who are unfamiliar with drop-off appointments, in many cases we can provide day hospitalization for a patient to allow us to spend more time on observation and diagnostics, and for convenient drop-off and pick-up times for the client.  Please understand that most drop-off patients will be staying with us until late afternoon.  Many of our evaluations and diagnostic tests will be done during our “lunch break”, and treatments will be determined during the afternoon.

If you have visited the clinic on Thursdays, and more recently on Monday mornings, you will have noticed a new face around the office.  Dr. Anne Hansalik has joined us as a relief/associate veterinarian, and helps Dr. Billie out two days a week.  She also helps fill in when Dr. Billie is out of town. 

Dr. Anne graduated from the College of Veterinary Medicine at Texas A&M University over 20 years ago, and has practiced in Texas and New Hampshire.  She and her husband live in the Franconia/Sugar Hill area, and are raising 4 wonderful children.  She is a very kind, caring vet, and all of our furry and fuzzy clients have been very impressed with her!  Please welcome Dr. Anne when you come by the clinic!

You are all familiar with our technician, Jen.  On December 21st, she presented us with our newest little technician-in-training!  Miss Ella Leigh was born at about 2:30 in the afternoon, and weighed in at a whopping 8 pounds, 15 ounces.  Wow!  Jen just returned to work on Monday, so please tell her congratulations when you stop by!

Your much neglected blog has finally been updated!  We have much news, but we’ll start with the fact that at the end of last October, our American Animal Hospital Association accreditation was renewed!  We spent several months preparing for our accreditation visit, and, once again, we passed with flying colors.  We are so very proud to be associated with a group that requires that we meet more than 900 standards over and above what is required by law.  You can be assured that when you visit our clinic, you are being served by a group that provides the very best quality of care possible.  You can visit AAHA’s web pages to learn more about this impressive group of hospitals at http://www.aahanet.org

Companion Pet Care has just gone a little greener (and we hope our colleagues will be green with envy!)  We have just acquired a brand-spanking new digital x-ray system which allows us to dispense with harmful developing chemicals.  We simply take our radiographs using special digital x-ray cassettes, which are read directly into a computer, and we have the images within a few seconds!

We can make exposure adjustments after the images have been taken, allowing us to take far fewer radiographs while trying to get the exposure just right, thereby exposing your pet to less radiation.  We can also communicate our images to specialists for review simply by sending an e-mail instead of trotting down to the post office with our precious one-of-a-kind images and sending them away.  We can even copy images onto a CD-ROM for clients if they need to hand-carry them to a specialist for referral cases, or look at them at home on their own computers.

We’ve been using our new system for about 3 weeks, and are very pleased with the ease of use and the quality of our images.  Feel free to ask about our new equipment next time you’re in our office!

Quite belatedly, I’m announcing that Dr. Lambert has decided to leave Companion Pet Care and make her way south to Tennessee to be near her sister, who just became a new mother last summer!  We wish her the best in her new endeavors, and we miss her presence in our clinic. 

I’ll be looking for a new associate and hope to find just the right person to fit into our practice sometime over the next few months.  In the meantime, our schedule seems to be full all the time, so please have patience with us as we try our best to accomodate all of our clients and fit everyone in in a timely fashion!  Receptionists Jackie and Diane are doing an excellent job of triaging sick patients and scheduling their appointments appropriately.  Technicians Becky and Jen are keeping up with client communications and helping me with my callbacks as much as possible.

Please be assured that we will NEVER compromise our high standards of patient and client care, no matter how busy we may be!

On July 2, this lovely display ad was published in the Littleton Courier:

We appreciate this acknowlegement so much!  We consider it a privilege that we were able to provide care for Bailey, and we continue to hold the Gilpin family in our thoughts…

Hard to believe that all this time has flown, but young Lucas is now about 8 weeks old, and star technician Jen is back at work, drawing blood and doing labwork, providing the excellent care for your pets you’ve come to expect from her.  Welcome back, Jen!  We’ve missed you!