The Royal Veterinary College has launched a Renal Recovery Clinic to provide specialist follow-up care for dogs recovering from acute kidney injury (AKI).

The clinic sits within the Queen Mother Hospital for Animals’ Nephrology and Urology service and will monitor dogs during the three months after an AKI episode, when ongoing complications such as high blood pressure can emerge.

Access is via referral from the patient’s primary care veterinary practice.

Ahead of each appointment, owners complete a pre-appointment questionnaire about the dog’s wellbeing at home.

Patients then receive a clinical re-examination with the Nephrology and Urology team, with support from Emergency and Critical Care specialists.

Monitoring includes blood and urine testing and blood pressure measurement, with ultrasound considered depending on discussion at the appointment.

Owners attending the clinic can opt into a longitudinal research study looking at longer-term outcomes after AKI.

Professor Rosanne Jepson, Professor in Small Animal Nephrology and Internal Medicine at the RVC, said: “We hope that clients who are keen to attend this clinic will be willing to also participate in a study so that we can keep in touch with owners and dogs that have been treated for AKI, monitoring their clinical response and also quality of life, so that in the future we can better understand and continually give the very best care in this important recovery period.”

https://rvc.uk.com/renal-clinic 

Veterinary organisations have broadly welcomed the Competition and Markets Authority’s final reforms for the sector, with responses from across the profession largely supportive of the package’s focus on transparency, consumer information and Veterinary Surgeons Act reform.

The main note of caution came from the RCVS, which said it had concerns about proposals around publishing anti-parasitic medicine prices and about recommended changes to the College’s governance structure.

The Society of Practising Veterinary Surgeons (SPVS) also warned the package would bring significant operational and commercial consequences for practices, echoing an earlier VetSurgeon.org analysis that suggested implementation could cost some practices several thousand pounds.

Elsewhere, the BVA, BVNA and BSAVA all backed the measures proposed by the CMA, and the PDSA welcomed the exemption for charities.

However, whilst greater transparency is undoubtedly a good thing, there are reasons to doubt how much difference some of the CMA’s measures will make in practice.

A price comparison website may make fees for commoditised services easier to compare, but it cannot capture the qualities that many owners actually choose a vet for: judgement, experience, bedside manner and clinical philosophy.

A tool that judges veterinary services primarily on price risks devaluing precisely those aspects of care.

The bigger difficulty is that the reforms focus mainly on transparency, not on the other underlying drivers of cost.

Veterinary medicine has become steadily more sophisticated and expensive, shaped by scientific progress, vets’ understandable desire to do the best possible for the patient in front of them, regulatory expectations, pet insurance, commercial pressures, and society’s changing tolerance of risk.

Until the profession is willing to confront the question of whether modern veterinary medicine is too often presenting clients with levels of investigation and treatment that they cannot afford, or that cost more than they believe it is right to spend on a pet animal, transparency measures alone will not make the controversy disappear. 

Without addressing that deeper issue, the negative headlines are unlikely to go away.