19 Oct 2023
Queen tribute act headlines proceedings to mark opening of two-branch Beacon VetCare, while catering also raises £2,500 for suicide awareness and prevention charity The Canmore Trust.
Paul Imrie
Job Title
A mini-festival has officially marked the launch of an independent practice in Cornwall, with proceeds and donations boosting suicide awareness and prevention charity The Canmore Trust.
Beacon VetCare has a clinic in Newquay, with a second site set to open in nearby Summercourt in November.
To mark the launch of the practice, a mini-festival was held, attended by more than 300 people of all ages and featuring Queen tribute band The Good Old Fashioned Lover Boys as the main act.
Members of local construction teams who been part of the design and building projects were at the gathering, along with friends, family, and other vets and nurses from across Cornwall who had worked with members of the Beacon team previously.
Bar proceed and donations raised £2,500 for The Canmore trust – a suicide awareness and prevention charity set up in memory of new graduate vet Cameron Gibson, who died in 2019.
Beacon VetCare is owned by Colin and Lizzy Whiting, who moved to Cornwall in 2007 and raised their family there. Colin had met Cameron’s dad, John, on his Land’s End to John O’Groats walk last year, and his passion to raise awareness of suicide in the profession made a lasting impression on the couple.
Both have been recent presidents of the Cornwall Veterinary Association and launched VetWings – an online support and mentoring group for vet students that has now gone global with 15,000 members.
Colin said: “We have a very strong community ethic for Beacon; that’s our local community of pet owners as well as our wider veterinary professional community.
“Our profession has a long history of supporting our newer generations – just as Tristan ‘saw practice’ with James Herriott – so we all benefit from opportunities and advice passed down, and sometimes university lecture topics passed ‘upwards’ to our grey-haired ears, too.
“Our practice centre in Summercourt will have an ‘education and inspiration’ room for visiting classes of schoolchildren, as well as two en-suite accommodation rooms allocated to vet students coming to Cornwall for EMS.”
The Summercourt hub will have three operating theatres and a CT scanner to facilitate Colin’s referral orthopaedic and spinal surgery caseload, with patients travelling from across the south-west for his team’s expertise. Beacon’s emergency and critical care centre will also operate there.
The Newquay premises, which opened last month, has five consulting rooms; a large back-of-house clinical area; and full diagnostic, surgical and dental facilities.
Lizzy said: “Currently, there’s a shortage of both vets and nurses, but without spending a single penny on recruitment we’ve now welcomed 30 very experienced colleagues to join Beacon, overwhelmingly leaving corporate-owned competitors through word of mouth because they identify strongly with our community ethos.”
