20 Jun 2025
When Alasdair Frost co-founded Swift Referrals, he had no idea the practice would be sold to IVC just over a year later – Swift indeed. But now he’s back in the game having opened Pennine Veterinary Referrals and this time he’s in it for the long haul, as VBJ discovered when we paid a visit to the north-east last month…
James Westgate
Job Title
For Alasdair Frost, orthopaedics runs in the family. Older brother Andrew is widely regarded as one of the finest orthopaedic surgeons in his field of human health and so, when Alasdair wanted to pivot after three years in mixed practice following his graduation from Edinburgh more than 20 years ago, he didn’t have far to look for guidance.
But veterinary medicine, with its convoluted and self-funded routes to the referral disciplines, doesn’t work in the same way as its human counterpart, which meant Alasdair’s route to the discipline has been circuitous to say the least.
He said: “I have wanted to be a vet since I was eight years old and developed an interest in orthopaedics early in my career. My brother, Andrew, was obviously a big inspiration and a mentor, and it just made a lot of sense.
“So, I did an internship at Fitzpatrick, which was a tough slog as we were doing 100-hour weeks. We had some seriously impressive interns there at the time like Russell Yeadon, Tom Smith and Karen Perry and we all got through it, but after that I just didn’t fancy a residency.”
So, Alasdair decided to up sticks and move to Hong Kong, where he worked in private practice before spending time at the SPCA where the varied caseload provided the perfect opportunity to refine and develop his surgical skills.
And the six years he spent working in the former British colony proved to be a very positive move in other ways, too. Not only did he meet his wife, May, but it was also where the entrepreneurial instincts that would come to shape Alasdair’s career really began to take hold.
He said: “I wanted a change and there were clearly opportunities in Hong Kong where I was head surgeon at the SPCA, which meant I got to do a lot of interesting work. I also met my wife, with whom I now have three children, and set up two businesses, one as a mobile surgeon and the other – which I still own today – selling veterinary implants, and it was that which provided us with an important income when we came back to the UK.
“Veterinary Orthopaedics started when myself and a few friends in Hong Kong started to group together to buy surgical kit and instruments. We were just on the doorstep of Guangzhou, which is a huge city of almost 19 million people, while there are more than 100 million people in the wider area.
“We couldn’t buy from the manufacturers there unless we met the minimum order quantities, so we got together to buy kit, and it just grew from there.
“And when we came back from Hong Kong in 2014 we did BSAVA, and I think we did about £20,000 from one show and it was then that I realised we might have a really good business, which obviously proved the case and the revenue from that obviously helped us when we came home.”
After returning from Hong Kong, Alasdair spent four years working at Wear Referrals, before leaving just a month before Linnaeus acquired the business.
Following his departure from Wear, Alasdair went on to found Swift Referrals with former colleagues Rory Bell, Jonathan Bell (no relation) and Stuart Cooke.
Alasdair said “We set up Swift in Wetherby – an hour from this current site – the business thrived, and within 13 months it had been sold to IVC. I stayed on with the other founders once it was sold, but it was proving to be a long commute from where we were living and I realised I was only staying on out of loyalty to the other partners who were still there.”
Alasdair decided to leave in 2023, working as a mobile surgeon as he searched for a suitable location to strike out on his own.
“There was obviously risk in that, but I have never been in this for money, and I wanted to get back into running my own veterinary hospital and doing surgery as it is what I love.”
It didn’t take long to find the perfect spot, an open tract of North Yorkshire countryside, a mile from Scotch Corner on the A1, with distant views of the Pennines to the west and to the east, the rugged outline of the North York Moors.
Built using the latest sustainable building techniques, the roof of the 9,000 sq ft building is adorned with high-efficiency solar panels while 12km of piping underneath the fields surrounding the site transfer heat from ground source pumps. This means the building costs a fraction to heat when compared to similar sized buildings.
Working with local architecture practice Cellar Door and having spent “many hours” on the Floorplanner app, Alasdair produced a design that delivers on every level.
Housed in a steel-framed industrial unit, the facade of the building has been stone clad, providing durability and insulation, as well as helping the building blend into its rural surroundings.
The practice is flooded with light thanks to large windows in almost every area – bar the four consult rooms – while sky lights and double level voids deliver an abundance of natural illumination to both the central prep areas and the impressive reception space, which boasts floor-to-ceiling windows that offer panoramic views across the Vale of York.
There are four consult rooms adjoining the reception area with easy access to the prep room at the end of a long corridor running behind the consult rooms. Opposite the prep room sits a large kennelling area for dogs – which make up 90 per cent of the Pennine caseload.
Adjacent to the large prep area is the x-ray room, which features a Zoomax Red gantry-mounted direct digital x-ray machine, while in an adjacent room sits the 32-slice Siemens Somaton.go scanner.
Rather than invest more in a CT machine with a higher slice number, Alasdair – under advice from a human radiologist and his brother – opted to invest more of his money in the software to run it.
He said: “I took a lot of advice on this and realised that the software is more important than how many slices the machine takes. The software we have is amazing and allows us to render perfect 3D images in real time and also to strip away or add in anatomical elements instantly as well as metal artefact reduction.”
Unsurprisingly, the theatre also boasts some high-end kit, including a 4K Arthrex arthroscopy tower and a C-Arm imaging device which allows for the flexible position of x-ray source and detector and provides instant and high-quality images during surgeries.
The practice also used a flexible nanoscope, which allows Alasdair to perform speedy stifle arthroscopy to avoid missing meniscal tears in tight joints where it can be hard to visualise the meniscus.
More building work is currently being carried out to install a high field 1.5T Siemens Magnetom Flow.ace MRI scanner, which uses far less helium than traditional machines. This is expected to be in operation by the end of June.
But, despite the impressive building and the state-of-the-art equipment housed inside, for Alasdair, the most important thing at Pennine Referrals is its people. He said: “One of the things that I have noticed during my career at other practices is that when a business starts to grow, the culture can be lost and sometimes negatively impacted.
“So, from the start here I was determined to build the right team with the right people as this job can become pretty miserable if the culture is not right.
“We’ve been doing team coaching, and going forward, that’s really a big priority for me – getting the team being happy and fostering a real team spirit. Because if you’ve got a happy team, they do great work. And the by-product of great work is money, and we need that to keep a place like this going.”
In a challenging referral market, Alasdair believes that a fixed pricing structure and fair rates give Pennine Veterinary Referrals a real competitive advantage against its rivals.
He added: “A challenging market plays into our hands, because we have fixed pricing and a complications guarantee for many routine surgeries, but also because we are quite a bit better priced than a lot of other referral practices.
“We also run a lot of CPD events from the practice, which helps us to spread the word among first opinion practices in the area. Those CPD events actually cost us a lot to put on, but it has definitely been worth it to build our reputation and get to know the local vets better.”
Pennine currently takes referrals in orthopaedics, neurology, soft tissue, cardiology, oncology, anaesthesia and internal medicine and the practice is in the process of building up its ECC provision, too.
The medicine service at Pennine is led by David Mackenzie, who has a certificate in emergency care and will lead the development the service.
But beyond those immediate objectives, Alasdair has no intention of growing too big, too quickly.
Along with Alasdair and David Mackenzie, Claire Brown is the other referral surgeon at Pennine. She is an RCVS advanced practitioner in small animal surgery with a particular passion for orthopaedic and soft tissue procedures, with special focus on stifle surgery and fracture management, as well as laparoscopic surgery.
It is a small team, but one Alasdair will build with care as the practice develops. “I think, ultimately, we might end up with around nine vets here, but we are in no hurry and the plan is to build from the solid foundations we have started with,” he said.
”The next thing I want to do is to take on another medic and potentially a neurologist. But I don’t want to become too big too quickly and then lose control of the culture. My priority is the team and ensuring they are happy and fostering a real team spirit, everything else will grow from there.”
