You’ve seen advertisements for spay/neuter clinics offering surgeries for lower prices than your regular veterinarian charges, and you may think using one of these clinics is a smart option. Before you choose this option, however, you need to understand how these clinics can afford to charge such low prices for their services. There are actually profound differences between most low-cost clinics and full-service hospitals when it comes to quality of care and the individual attention these medical facilities provide to you and your pet.
Quality of Care
In general, high-quality care is more expensive than care that just meets the minimum acceptable standard. To keep prices low, many bulk spay/neuter clinics provide only basic care. This means they may not routinely offer fluid therapy, pre-anaesthetic blood work, extensive monitoring, thorough pain management or inhalant anesthesia.
Fluids
Intravenous fluids help keep patients hydrated during surgery. This is important for maintaining blood pressure, ensuring appropriate metabolism of anaesthetic drugs, maintaining electrolyte balance and ensuring proper organ function. While routinely providing fluids increases the cost of surgery, it is worth the additional expense because it reduces the risk of complications and speeds recovery times. Studies have shown that patients receiving fluids during anaesthesia recover faster and experience less pain, nausea, dizziness and other unpleasant side effects during recovery than patients not receiving fluids.
Pre-Anaesthetic Blood Work
Pre Anaesthetic Blood WorkMany low-cost spay/neuter clinics do not require routine preoperative blood testing for young animals that appear healthy. While these pets have a much lower risk of surgical complications than old or infirm pets, they can still have underlying health issues that put them at risk during surgery. Basic blood tests can detect some of these issues before they cause serious problems.
Patient Monitoring
Continuous monitoring by a trained technician is important for ensuring patient safety, but many low-cost clinics do not have sufficient staff to provide this service. Instead, they often have one staff member covering multiple patients or performing multiple tasks in addition to monitoring. This compromises patient safety because continuous monitoring allows for detection and treatment of many anaesthetic problems before they can turn life threatening.
Complete Pain Management
Complete Pain ManagementEven though they are good at hiding their suffering, dogs and cats feel pain and anyone who has ever had abdominal surgery knows that postsurgical pain is very real. Unfortunately, many low-cost clinics do not provide pain management for every patient. This leads to unnecessary suffering and increased recovery times for veterinary patients.
Inhalant Anesthesia
Using gas to maintain anesthesia provides a margin of safety because it allows the technician or doctor monitoring the anesthesia to adjust the depth of the patient quickly. Many commonly used injectable protocols do not have this margin of safety. Unfortunately, modern inhalants and the equipment needed to deliver them are expensive, so many low-cost surgical clinics cut costs by not using them routinely.
Individual Attention
Personalized attention for each pet is something that low-cost clinics cannot offer. They exist only to provide spays and neuters for low prices. Commonly, these clinics take in a large number of animals on surgery days and treat them as a group. Full-service hospitals and clinics, by contrast, treat each pet as an individual.
Because full-service clinics and hospitals exist to see to an animal’s medical needs for its entire lifetime, they provide individualized care. This can include tailoring procedures to each patient’s needs and providing other services at the time of surgery. Full-service facilities are also more likely than clinics offering only spays and neuters to pay close attention to any specific concerns you have about your pet.
Visit Martindale Animal Clinic to book your spay and neuter appointment and be sure your pet is treated like an individual.
Vet courtesy of Army Medicine
Taking Blood courtesy of Hakan Dahlstrom
Bosco at the Vet courtesy of Laura
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