Extending your clinic’s diagnostics and competitive advantage

Ever wanted a CT in your own clinic, just for that one-off case? Ever wanted super high quality ultrasound at your fingertips to get a key piece of diagnostic information?

For those cases where you think advanced imaging may be useful for your workups, you can access it through the Southern Animal Referral Centre emergency and critical care department outpatient imaging service as part of your workup.

Seven days a week the emergency and critical care department at the Southern Animal Referral Centre accepts outpatient imaging referrals for workup as part of primary care clinician cases. In many situations cases have been worked up to a point where a single test or procedure not available in-clinic would be beneficial to push the case past a point of indecision.

This is exactly the situation where the easy availability of outpatient diagnostics gives the clinician the critical information to continue directed treatment rather than speculating on the cause and trialling presumptive therapy.

Numerous cases have been moved past this point with the benefit of advanced imaging using ultrasound, endoscopy or CT, giving the clinician the critical information needed to continue.

Some examples of this may be confirmation of Cushing’s disease through abdominal imaging (after your blood tests), determination of possible foreign bodies, abdominal or thoracic masses prior to further invasive and risky procedures, identification and biopsy of oesophageal or gastric lesions and ultrasound-guided FNA of thoracic and abdominal organs. All these examples are from real cases seen recently at the Southern Animal Referral Centre and resulted in the primary care clinician being able to proceed productively and confidently with treatment.

Between the primary care veterinary clinic and referral centre, there are often all the tools required to obtain an effective diagnosis. Proactive and selective use of our equipment and collaboration with our clinicians offers additional diagnostics and treatment of everyday cases seen in primary practice. The primary care clinician may elect to receive the patient back after isolated diagnostic procedures, or can opt to allow the emergency and critical care department to continue workup and treatment. Either way, we are happy to collaborate with outpatient diagnostics to move cases forward and improve outcomes and satisfaction for the client and primary care vet.

Imaging or other diagnostic results can be forwarded to the primary care clinician immediately by fax, email or on a CD and we are most happy to immediately discuss the findings over the phone with a report following. This allows the primary care clinician to see exactly what has been found on diagnostics and to have a high quality reference when making further plans for the patient.

So, next time you have a case which may benefit from a diagnostic procedure such as advanced imaging, please do not hesitate to give us a call and see if we can be of assistance in your overall case workup.

The emergency and critical care department has access to in-house CT, abdominal ultrasound, cardiac ultrasound and endoscopy from small cats to large dogs.

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