Here at Queen Street Veterinary Services we perform a variety of procedures and surgeries on pets. It is our top priority to ensure the safety and comfort of our patients before, during, and after surgery.
You can be confident that we use current, advanced protocols for each patient. Each individual has their own anaesthetic protocol tailored to their needs depending on their age, health status, and anaesthetic risk assessment. As part of the anaesthetic risk assessment, we perform blood work on all of our patients to assess overall health and organ function. The blood work we run evaluates many things such as the red blood cells, white blood cells, protein levels, enzymes, and electrolytes. We pay close attention to the liver enzyme values as the liver filters the drugs from the blood and the kidney enzyme values as they kidneys excrete the drug into the urine. Often times changes in organ function are detected on blood work evaluation long before any clinical signs are evident. This is why it is our clinic policy that every patient undergoing general anaesthesia has blood work performed ahead of time so we can prepare our medication protocol and take measure to ensure our patients remain safe and healthy.
During surgery, our patients are continuously monitored by our highly trained Veterinary Technicians. To assist in the monitoring process, we have advanced monitoring equipment including a Digicare Life Monitoring system which allows us to digitally monitor many vital parameters at once. Specific things that we monitor include blood pressure, respiration rate, heart rate, temperature, heart electric activity with electrocardiography, carbon dioxide exhalation levels with capnography, and blood oxygen level with pulse oximetry. With these readings, it allows us to keep our patients in a safe and appropriate level of anaesthesia, alerts us to potential stimuli the patient may be feeling, if we need more or less of medications, and it allows us to control the recovery period of anaesthesia better.
It is also our clinic policy that every surgical patient requires intravenous access at all time so intravenous catheter placement is done prior to surgery. This involves shaving a small area of fur, usually on a front leg, and creating a clean, open passage to the blood vessel with a catheter. This allows us to take fast action if there was a surgical or medication complication that can have life-saving effects for our patients. This also allows us to run intravenous fluids during surgical procedures which will help protect internal organs, ensure hydration, and maintain appropriate blood pressure. Receiving fluids will replace any bleeding that may be unavoidable during surgery and will also replace any evaporation losses due to body cavities being open and exposed short term.
After the surgery or procedure is completed, our veterinary technicians continue monitoring manually for your pet’s entire recovery period to ensure the smoothest and most peaceful recovery possible.
For more information on our surgical and anaesthetic protocols please contact us.