Important Notice **Changes to our Out of Hours Service**

This is due to us at Scotts, as with many other Veterinary Practices around the UK, struggling with the dire shortage of vets in the UK coupled with a pet population ‘explosion’.

The situation has become a serious veterinary recruitment crisis which has hit the whole industry. Several practices across the country have had to close their doors permanently.

At Scotts it has meant we have had to dig deep for many months, pushing our team to their limits at times, whilst continuing to strive to provide a gold standard service to you and your pets.

We are incredibly grateful to you for your patience and understanding during these challenging times. Some team members have worked over 130 hours in a week, working days and nights, just to keep our doors open and out of hours emergency service running.

Working our team this hard is sadly not sustainable. They are some of the strongest, most determined people we know but they are burning out.

We therefore are having to make changes. We hope these changes will be for the short term, but they will certainly be for the foreseeable future.

Scotts will continue to function as we do now Monday to Thursday – providing exceptional 24-hour emergency and in-patient care to all of our patients. From 1^st September 2022, we will also continue to provide 24-hour in-patient care for our ill, hospitalised patients with our own vets and nurses throughout Friday to Sunday.

We will be open as usual on Saturday daytime, and will provide our own emergency service throughout Sunday daytime. The only change is that overnight on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, any new emergencies will be seen by an out-of-hours provider – Vets Now in Barton-Le-Clay (approximately 25 minutes from Goldington Road).

Details of timings are overleaf, but you won’t have to remember these times – when you phone the practice out-of-hours you will automatically be put through to the correct out-of-hours team.

Rest assured, this is not a decision we have made lightly. We are very fortunate and proud to still be able to maintain our overnight hospital care of ill patients 7 days a week. Please take time to understand our position and be kind to our staff.

Yours Faithfully

The Directors – Tally, Francesca, Vicki & Amy

From 1^st September 2022

• Monday-Thursday we will continue with our usual 24hr emergency care – provided by our own team onsite at our hospital on Goldington Road, Bedford.
• Friday overnight from 19:00-08:30 emergency care will be provided by Vets Now
• Saturday & Sunday from 08:30-18:30 our current and usual service remains unchanged.
• Saturday overnight from 18:30-08:30 and Sunday overnight from 18:30-08:00 emergency care will be provided by Vets Now (this applies to new emergencies, our hospitalised patients continue to receive 24hr care here at Goldington Road).

In the event of a genuine emergency, please contact us in the usual way and your call will be handled by the appropriate emergency team. More details are available here