With just our eyes, ears, nose(!), hands and nothing more sophisticated than a stethoscope we can obtain a lot of useful information. Often this together with our experience, gives us enough information to work out what is wrong and what we can do about it without further testing being necessary. However sometimes we need a bit more information and so we have the following bits of kit
Ophthalmoscope and Otoscope– for looking into eyes and ears
Blood pressure– We have a great quality Doppler Blood Pressure monitor that is specifically designed for dogs and cats. In addition a Blood Pressure measurement taken at home is normally more accurate than those taken in a clinic environment. This is because animals (like people at the doctor’s surgery) can get “White Coat Syndrome”- where a temporary falsely high reading can be obtained if they are stressed or anxious. Patients are more likely to be relaxed at home and this is especially true for cats.
UV Light– For diagnosing ringworm and sometimes for looking at eyes.


Blood tests, Fine Needle Aspirates, urine or skin samples etc.
We are very well practised at taking blood samples from patients at home and “Voltie” our custom designed electric van (see News) has excellent lighting inside and a table at just the right height to make everything as smooth as possible. Perfect for sampling a lump (FNA) or carying out another procedure.
We have state of the art laboratory equipment which we are able to use to run a blood test in house. Sometimes we will send samples off to external laboratory as this enables us to get more information.
As you would expect we also have a powerful microscope for making small things look HUGE so we can look at samples from skin or urine.
Xray
We have a state of the art DR Digital Xray system which allow us to quickly and easily get radio-graphs.


Ultrasound
We have a portable Ultrasound machine to help us get more information in a totally non-invasive way.