COVID-19 Alert Level 4 Clinic Protocol
As an essential service, our clinic will continue caring for your pets through COVID-19 Alert Level 4. To minimise the spread of COVID-19 and observe physical distancing, please respect the significant changes to our clinic operation during this time:
(1) No members of the public are permitted to enter the clinic premises. This means that upon your arrival at the clinic, you will need to phone us and one of our team members will come out to your car to escort your pet into the clinic for a veterinary examination. The duty veterinarian will examine your pet and phone you to address any health concerns you have with your pet.
(2) It is important that you let us know if your pet is coming from a household that has a confirmed or probable COVID-19 patient, so that our team members can take additional precautions when handling your pet. Please do not break self-isolation to bring your pets to the clinic – send a representative instead. It will be helpful if you could complete a Pet Health Questionnaire (download it at https://bit.ly/3be14cN) and email this to us at cahillvet@inspire.net.nz. Ensure you are available by phone during the time of your pet’s consultation.
(3) On-site consultations are strictly for emergencies only. Please ring us on 063588675 if you have a pet emergency and you will be triaged by the telemedicine team. If your pet has a non-urgent and stable health concern, we would appreciate if you phoned us at COVID-19 Alert Level 2 instead. However, if you are feeling uncertain or worried about your pet’s condition, or have any other urgent enquiries, please do not hesitate to get in touch with us.
(4) For pets currently registered with us as a patient - we do have limited ability to offer phone consultations with one of our veterinarians working remotely for less urgent conditions and re-prescription medication authorisations. Please note that there will be a consultation fee for this telemedicine phone service.
(5) Please ring us (or leave a voicemail) on 063588675 to order your pet’s medications, food, flea/worm preventatives or any other retail products. Please allow for at least 2-4 working days for prescription medications, and at least 4 working days for food orders to be organised for collection. When coming to the clinic to pick up medications or food, please phone us from your car, and our team member will provide directions on where to collect these supplies in a contactless manner.
(6) We are not accepting cash payment and would prefer payments to be made via internet banking. Please contact us to obtain your client number and you will need to email us a screenshot of the bank transaction.
(7) For emergencies outside our clinic hours, please phone our clinic number & follow the instructions to contact the afterhours pet emergency centre.
In order to lower the risk of our entire team being exposed to COVID-19, we have reduced staffing levels in Alert Level 4 to meet physical distancing requirements and additional rigorous sanitising measures have been instituted at the clinic. This does mean that our team members are still incredibly busy as everything takes longer to complete. For this reason, we seek your kind understanding when you are phoning us for an appointment as we may not be able to offer you an appointment within our previous time frames.
In order to keep our staff safe and healthy so that they can provide ongoing care for your pets, please note that we reserve the right to decline seeing anyone who refuses to abide by our COVID-19 health & safety operations protocol during this period.
Page updated by Cahill Animal Hospital on 28 June 2021