Practice Profile: Northlands Veterinary Hospital

VBJ profiled Northlands Veterinary Hospital four years ago and back then it felt as if the place could burst at the seams at any moment.

Based in the same converted two-storey Victorian townhouse in Kettering’s Northampton Road for more than 50 years, the practice had become a victim of its own success, with staff, clients and an ever-increasing number of patients jostling for space in the cramped old building.

With narrow corridors, small rooms and no scope to expand, when surgical capacity needed to be increased to meet demand, the only solution was to add a new theatre on to the first floor of an existing annex at the back of the building.

It was far from ideal for a busy 24-hour hospital and while the old building oozed character, it was clear the charm had long since worn off.

Even back then, plans were in motion for the practice to relocate to a new building, but a combination of factors meant it wasn’t until September 2021 that the much-anticipated move finally took place.

It has been a long wait, not least for practice manager Karl Walker, who has been involved with the new hospital project from the very start.

He said: “To say we had to wait a long time for this would be an understatement, as this move was first being planned back in 2017, but it has been totally worth the wait. The practice had grown organically in the old building to the point where there was no space to grow or develop, whereas here, we have been able to build a hospital from the ground up that is totally fit for purpose and allows us to grow the practice the way we want it to grow.

“We are just around the corner from the other place, but it really is another world when it comes to the extra space, the flow of work, the facilities and just the general performance of the building.”

Precision planned

The only similarity between the new hospital and the building it has replaced is that it is based in the footprint of one of Kettering’s many impressive Victorian buildings. But that is where the similarities end.

Whereas the site in Northampton Road was a classic example of a growing practice being forced to adapt to the limitations of its physical environment, the new £1.3 million building in Station Road is completely the opposite, with every inch of its 4,557 sq ft precision planned with the needs of a modern 24-hour veterinary business at the heart of the process.

The bottom floor is a self-contained, dedicated clinical space with double doors leading directly in from the car park to the rear of the building, straight into the prep and circulation areas. Feeding off this area are two operating theatres, the dental suite, CT scanner room, and the ultrasound and x-ray room.

A lift has also been installed to enable patients to be transported directly down from the client spaces on the ground floor into the engine room of the hospital.

A ramp provides trolleyed access up into cat, dog and small mammal wards – all of which are within easy reach of the lab, autoclave and laundry areas, as well as the ground floor exercise area for patients.

The ground floor contains a bright, open reception space with separate cat and dog waiting areas flanked by four naturally lit consult rooms, including one dedicated to cats and exotic species. Also on this floor is the dispensary, a large office – where all calls to the practice are handled to keep the reception team free to deal with clients – as well as a treatment area and a dedicated bereavement room with separate access to and from the practice.

The bulk of the office space is found on the first floor of the building, which also has a large meeting and CPD room, a common area for colleagues to relax, and three self-contained bedrooms for the dedicated night team members.

A building with ‘soul’

But while it ticks all the functional boxes, Karl and his team were keen to ensure the new building “had soul” and a lot of work was done from the early stages to ensure original Victorian features were maintained to protect the character of the building, much of which is more than 120 years old.

Karl said: “One of the other things that appealed to me was that it was an empty shell and a blank canvas, which was going to allow us to do exactly what we wanted to do.

“And, of course, it has the character. I don’t like the industrial units, I think they are just soulless. I know a lot of practices do it and they give you a lot of space, and I have absolutely no objection to that, but I just think we are that little bit different and I wanted this building to reflect that.

“Originally, the developer had planned to turn this and adjacent buildings into flats, but he was up for trying something new as he had never done a vet practice. So, he developed the site [which involved adding an extra floor to what had been a flat-roofed section joined to the original building] and once that work was completed, we signed a 20-year lease, and our own development people got on with transforming the inside of that structure into what we have today.

“I led the project, but we all had a clear vision of what we wanted from this building and we actively encouraged the different teams to have input into various different elements of the design, and that really helped them all buy into the project.

“One of the things we all wanted was to keep that essential character, so we restored the old staircase and kept as many of the original features as possible, like the Victorian arch work inside, and what was an original exterior wall has been retained with the extension and is now a feature wall in the common room area, which just looks great.”

Advanced imaging

In keeping with their approach, Karl and the team even retained some decades-old graffiti which now brightens up the outside exercise area – but the development is not an exercise in local nostalgia.

The building bristles with modern, high-end touches with air conditioning in every room and a piped gas system backed up by an emergency supply of bottled gas, which automatically kicks in should a problem develop with the main supply.

A GE NM 870 CT machine is another high-tech addition to the facility and it’s an addition that clinical director Hans van der Hoven and his team are keen to make the most of.

Hans said: “It is wonderful to have the CT, which is a facility that allows us to do things that we had not been able to do before.

“We are finding that we are getting cases that we couldn’t handle before and that we would have to refer; now, we can deal with those cases in-house to a much better degree.

“We had a run on dogs with head abscesses, for example, things that we would have in the past struggled to image or find using traditional x-ray. Now, we perform a CT and as soon as we have results we know there is an abscess and we can begin appropriate treatment immediately.

“It gives us that scope to be a better first opinion practice and means we can also take on some CT referral work for local practices on an outpatient basis.

“It is a new service for us at the moment, so we are starting small with it, but we are getting to the point now that we are getting confident enough with the service that we will soon be able to start expanding it and pushing it out to more people.”

Out-of-hours

One of the more established services offered by Northlands is its 24-hour hospital service that has proved extremely popular with local practices, even those not part of the six-branch group.

The OOH provision is covered by a dedicated night team of four vets, three VNs and four animal care assistants, with one of each providing the cover on any given night.

Providing the service can “have its difficulties”, but with the right team in place and the right balance – Northlands has just restructured its night rota so vets work five nights in row with 15 nights off – it can work well.

Hans added: “It takes the right kind of people to work in out-of-hours ECC and we have found a really good team.

“You do see a different type of work; sometimes it is busier and it can be more draining, but it can also be more invigorating. A lot of day-to-day veterinary care expects results over a few days, but with out of hours, the expectation is you have to get improvement immediately – that is the nature of the work.

“And the service is very busy, so there is always lots to keep the team busy as we have a lot of practices feeding into our service, with around 40% of those not VetPartners.”

Karl added: “We have just taken on a couple of local independents for out of hours. We have had a few practices voice their concern that we may start taking their clients, but that is just not who we are.

“We are not interested in taking clients from other practices – what we are trying to do is help practices in the area make the most of the fantastic hospital facility we have here that is open 24/7, no matter what. We just want to make sure that the patients that come here out of hours are looked after properly, and people just have to trust who we are and what we represent, and so far, most practices in the area have bought into that and come on board.”

Managing growth

And local pet owners have come on board, too. As well as retaining its existing client base following the move, Northlands has also grown its client base, with a carefully managed 2% increase since last September, when the new practice first opened its doors for business.

Karl said: “We closed our books to new clients from December to March, as we were increasing too fast and that was putting too much pressure on the team, so we closed the diary.

“So, we have had to manage growth carefully, but during the past 12 months, we have grown the number of clients and the revenue we are generating – we just couldn’t push too hard as we just needed that time to bed in and get things running as we would wish.”

Recruitment has also been a limiting factor on growth, as Karl explained: “At the old place we had four vets, and now we are up to six and we are looking to build that up to more.

“It has been a challenge to recruit in all areas: admin roles were hard to fill, trying to find receptionists was difficult too – in the past, we would have 50 applicants for a receptionist’s job, and we have seen that fall a lot – and when we did set up interviews, we would find people just not turning up, so it has been challenging.

“But fortunately, we seem to be getting past that now, but of course, finding vets is still very difficult and we are probably one or two vets short of where we want to be. But we are interviewing at the moment, so we have our fingers crossed.”

Hans added: “We have the facilities to have five vets working on any given day, we have enough consult rooms and we have the theatre space, and so forth.

“We don’t have the people at the moment to fill that on a regular basis and, at the moment, we are working with on average three vets a day here at the hospital, but once we have two more vets that will increase and we will be at that optimum level for this facility.”