Changes to our Out of Hours Provision from 26th September 2022
Since 1990 Greenbay Vets has provided its own out of hours cover for pets under their care. Since the early 2000s this arrangement has been shared jointly with our colleagues at Quarry House Veterinary Surgery.
Our small and dedicated team currently work regular night times and weekends ‘on call’ to look after your pets, alongside working normal hours during the day. Unfortunately, Quarry House recently gave us notice that they no longer intended to provide overnight out of hours care, and so would be withdrawing from that arrangement. As much as we wanted to continue to provide our own cover, it is not feasible for our vets and nurses to work more nights on call and still provide you and your pet with the exceptional level of care you are used to during the daytime hours. We simply do not have the capacity to double our on-call workload, or to employ dedicated nightshift staff.
We have therefore contracted the services of MiNightVet South Devon, emergency vets based out of Dart Vale Vets in Totnes, to provide our night-time out of hours cover, starting Monday 26th September 2022. The address is Station Road, Totnes, TQ9 5JR. This clinic is staffed by their own dedicated team and will be working on our behalf to deliver emergency care to your pet. The big advantage to this is that there will be a vet and nurse on site all night, awake and ready to attend to the care of your animal. All veterinary practices in Torbay now use this service.
The MiNightVet service will run from 7pm until 8am Monday to Sunday, including bank holidays. During these times calls to our normal number will be redirected to the MiNightVet service. The emergency vet may offer advice over the phone or request to see your pet. MiNightVet do not offer out of hours home visits, and all animals will need to be transported to the MiNightVet clinic for treatment. Payment for treatment will need to be made at the time of the consultation.
Our surgeries in Torquay and Paignton will continue to open as they do now on weekends and bank holidays. In the event of an emergency during the weekend daytime, our emergency team will be available as they are now. The dedicated MiNightVet service is only for night-time emergencies, and we will continue to provide a daytime service.
In an emergency, call 01803 606059, as you do now.
We will continue to deliver all our in-patient care as usual with a nurse and vet assigned to in-patient checks. In the rare instance that a patient must be hospitalised overnight at a surgery the duty veterinarian will assess the frequency of checks required overnight. We do not have staff on site at our surgeries 24 hours a day.
We are confident, that should you need to use them, MiNightVet will provide an excellent night-time emergency service for you and your pets.