Why Choose Us
Everybody's Veterinary Practice
We would like to be accessible to all pet owners in the catchment area of our Henley and Twyford surgeries, regardless of income, working hours, disability or transport limitations.
At our Henley surgery we are open from 8am to 7pm every weekday and 9am to 5pm on a Saturday, so that even commuters with very long working hours should have a fair chance of being able to get an appointment at some point in the week.
Our Twyford surgery is open on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays, 9am-6pm (we close for 1hr between 3pm-4pm on Mondays), with plans to expand to 5 days a week by the end of 2025.
We provide our own out of hours emergency service and overnight hospital care at our Henley surgery, Monday to Friday. We also offer home visits or, in some circumstances a nurse to collect your pet, which may be helpful for those who have no transport or are unable to lift their collapsed dog.
A very experienced team
We have a very experienced team of vets and nurses, covering both the Henley and the Twyford surgeries. A dozen members have been with us for over a decade and a third of those are approaching twenty years employment.
Two of the vets have more than thirty years experience apiece, five of them can boast between ten and twenty five years in practice. We are a naturally collaborative team with individuals having their own areas of special interest and expertise but everyone putting their heads together over difficult cases or puzzling diagnoses.
The nursing team is made up predominantly of experienced qualified nurses with three or four student nurses in training at any one time. We are a recognised training practice or TP and this status ensures that we keep up the highest standards of nursing care as we are regularly inspected.
Value for money
We are not a cheap practice but we are far from being one of the most expensive in the area and we do charge honestly and transparently for our services. Our fees for all procedures, from a routine check-up to major orthopaedic surgery, are calculated from the time taken, as a proportion of the overall daily running costs of the practice. The running costs for this practice will be higher than for many others, partly because Henley is just a very expensive place to finance and maintain a property! We also chose to employ and retain high quality experienced staff which is obviously more expensive than having a continuous turnover of recent graduates.
We do NOT artificially lower the headline fees and then subsidise them with “hidden” high markups on drugs and other charged items such as bandage materials and IV drip sets and external laboratory fees. In fact, our margins on drugs and consumables are amongst the lowest you will find in veterinary practices. We cannot compete with the big online pharmacies on price for the most expensive of the high-turnover medicines but we are happy to issue our clients with a written prescription for these drugs.
We very much encourage clients to ask for an estimate of costs before embarking on a course of treatment or diagnostic investigations. Even if your pet is insured we suggest you do this because we can never predict with any certainty whether an insurer will pay up.
Nurse clinics
Because we have such a strong team of experienced Veterinary Nurses we are able to offer many useful services through our Clinic Nurse appointments. These appointments are less expensive than appointments with a vet and in some cases completely FREE!
Our nurses do dressing changes, post operation check-ups, “fit for life” clinics for older pets, monitoring of diabetic pets, blood samples, administer medication if the owners are struggling, second vaccinations, flea and worm treatments and advice, dietary advice and weight clinics, first aid courses and many other essential services.
Perhaps most importantly of all, nurses can provide a lifeline for pet owners on a severely limited income. If you fall into that category and are worried about your pet but not sure if he or she is really ill enough to warrant the expense of a vet appointment, then make an appointment with the clinic nurse instead.