Practice Profile: Vets4Pets Northampton Hospital

The Northampton Hospital was Vets4Pets’ first 24-hour site when it opened in 2009 and, since then, the practice has gone from strength to strength.

By the summer of 2020, the hospital had 24,000 registered clients, employed a team of 40 and was turning over more than £3 million.

Turbocharged by the surge in pet ownership during the pandemic, that growth continued and the number of active clients increased by a further 20% over the next two years, with the business now generating revenues in excess of £5 million.

That sort of success has made owner Jenny Millington and joint venture partner RVN Davinia Graves the perfect poster girls for Vets4Pets’ JVP model, but it had also started to create problems.

At just 2,000 sq ft, the practice’s previous site on St James’ Road in the town centre was practically bursting at the seams, meaning the search for a new base had become a top priority.

Various options came under consideration during what proved to be a lengthy search, including opening another branch site in the town and keeping the hospital where it was.

But rather than branching out, Jenny was determined to expand the size of the hospital and, ultimately, the perfect solution was found on a retail park just 500 yards away.

At 8,000 sq ft, the former Bensons for Beds showroom was four times the size of the hospital’s previous home, but, as Jenny explained, it looks like being the perfect fit for this ambitious practice.

Rapid growth

Jenny said: “I became a JVP in 2009 after working locally in another practice and I felt it was the right stage of my career to do my own thing.

“The business just took off and went from four colleagues when we opened to very quickly getting a second vet within a few months, and just building the team.

“Probably three or four years ago, we realised we’d outgrown the building we were in as we were up to about 40 colleagues and, towards the end of 2020, we had to stop new client registrations as we had become so busy.

“Lots of partners in JVPs have three or four sites, and that was a consideration – maintaining the old site and opening another site – but I wasn’t comfortable with that. I wanted one big 24-hour site rather than two sites and trying to manage two teams.

“And this place was perfect: there is parking for 40 to 50 colleagues round the back and client parking round the front, it is in a great location, and gives us the space we knew we needed to continue our expansion.”

Other factors in favour of the chosen site were the availability of outside space to exercise patients and its location so close to the old hospital.

But transforming the building into a veterinary hospital was not without its headaches.

And one of the biggest was that the building had next-to-no drainage – certainly not nearly enough for a veterinary practice.

One option considered was to install pumps to move the vast amounts of waste water, but that was not a solution Jenny was happy with – especially for the largest practice in the Vets4Pets group.

That meant breaking out the concrete base of the unit to add the drainage network required, which delayed the project and added another £50,000 to the £1.2 million overall cost.

But despite the scale of the build, once the drainage issues had been resolved, the rest of the project largely went according to plan – Jenny’s plan.

Perfect planning

Jenny had a very clear idea on what she wanted and where she wanted it to be, even if that meant some extra work for the architects working with the Vets4Pets fit out team.

“Vets4Pets has its own architects, but with this site we pretty much designed it ourselves,” she added.

“So, they would give us an idea and we’d put a line through it and say, ‘move that there, that there’. We knew what we wanted to do. It was great for us to have so much input into the design process.

“An example of that is we wanted a treatment room, which wasn’t in the original drawings, and that’s working well in practice. Our idea was a room off the back of consults that the consulting vets will use for blood samples, cannulas, fine needle aspirates, things that traditionally would be done in the prep room.

“The vets are now not interrupting and disturbing what’s going on in prep – prep is just for prep.

“Another aspect is that a lot of thought went into what we wanted for the colleagues, so we have a massive colleague area, which was another addition. On the face of it, that area doesn’t make money, but it actually does – it helps to retain colleagues and gives them somewhere to sit and have their lunches together and bond, which wasn’t happening at the old place. So, the colleague area is important, as well as the office space, meeting room, bedroom, shower and toilets, and colleague facilities.

“So, the layout is all ours – we decided what wards we were going to have, how many consult rooms, how many theatres, what office space we needed, everything.”

The hospital boasts 10 consult rooms – double the number at the previous site – based around a large reception that is split between cat and dog waiting areas.

Staff access the clinical areas of the practice via the pharmacy, where the treatment room, three operating theatres, a dental suite and the cat ward – complete with the latest Casco Pet cages – surround the large prep area.

Opposite prep is the huge “colleague room”, which features a full kitchen – complete with high-end coffee machine – where colleagues can relax and mingle during downtime.

Almost all the equipment is brand new, while every room is air conditioned and the practice also boasts its own on-site oxygen generator and 10 Humphrey ADE low flow anaesthesia systems.

Another interesting touch is that the design and build of the practice has been done in a way that incorporates the different journeys of staff and clients through the building.

Jenny added: “We’ve done very much a colleague journey through the practice and did a lot to separate the client journey from that, even just having different colour paint on the walls and different flooring. It feels different if you’re in the colleague area than when you’re in the client area – we really wanted to make the distinction.”

Self-sufficient

Jenny and the team have only been in their new home for just more than a month, but it is clear they are already enjoying the benefits of their new building.

More space means the block on new registrations has been lifted, which has resulted in the practice registering more than 100 new clients every week since moving to the new site.

Part of the appeal for clients is clearly the 24-hour nature of the operation, something that also appeals to Jenny’s clinicians, as she explained.

Jenny said: “I think the 24-hour is key because clients love the continuity of care and the vets love it because they get to keep the more complicated cases so they get the chance to stretch themselves.

“It enables us to keep inpatients and we can get a higher turnover because we’re doing more complicated cases. It helps my recruitment, too, because the vets can develop their interest and keep the patients in.

“We can hospitalise them here, so if you’ve got a dog that’s been hit by a car, that might need to be in somewhere for three or four days, so if you’re not 24-hour, it would be referred, so you’d lose it to referral; not necessarily because it needs referral, but because it needs continuous care.

“It also helps that we’ve got a really big client base ourselves. So, a lot of clients means we’re generating a lot of our own cases, but equally, we support 10 other local Vets4Pets, so they know if they’ve got an inexperienced vet, they just send their case to us – it might just be a foreign body or a c-section, but we can support them and take that, and then we’ll keep that animal in until it goes home.”

Managing a 24-hour rota is not easy, of course – especially as many staff members work part-time hours.

Some vets and nurses do only night work while some do a combination; but for Jenny, it is crucial every member of the team feels comfortable with the hours they are expected to work.

She said: “When I have a new starter on the vet or nurse team, it’s very much like, ‘do you want to do any nights? If you don’t want to do it, it’s fine because we’ve got a full team’.

“We have a new grad that’s just started and he’s very interested in ECC, so he’s already wanting to do some nights with one of us as backup. So, he’s got that interest and we develop that. I might have another grad that doesn’t want to do it – we just don’t put them on. So, I think it’s important not putting someone on an area or a role they don’t want to do.

“It all makes for a bit of a complicated ‘headachy’ rota, but because we let them do what suits them, they stay in the role. So, we can make it fit and jiggle it, and they’re happy, you know.

“We are lucky in that we have a big enough team to offer that flexibility and it really helps retain the team.”

High-performing teams

Developing the team and providing the support and caseload they need to progress their careers is something that has always been central to Jenny’s ethos when it comes to running the practice, which now employs 60 people, including 14 vets and 25 nurses.

And this is where having a vet nurse JVP partner in the business has been so important.

Davinia said: “We have someone leading the vet team and someone leading the nursing team, and I think that’s key and it will be even more crucial to our ongoing success here.

“We used to run one nurse clinic all day at the old site; here, we’ve got two and they’re already full. We’re looking at bringing in three nurses consulting all day and we are also looking at developing a nurse ops day, too.

“We’ve got three or four senior nurses that have done consultant certificates. They’re really experienced, so they’re doing a lot of what would traditionally be a vet appointment. That might be medication and injections, medication checks, vaccinations, or in some instances, boosters.

“That then frees the vet appointments for some of the more in-depth stuff.”

Having that level of support means Jenny – who still consults three days a week – can ensure the vet team really gets the chance to fully flex their clinical muscles in a safe and supportive clinical environment.

She added: “We’ve got certificate holders in surgery, two ECC certificate holders, a medicine certificate holder and I’m a general practitioner certificate holder, so we have got all bases covered and they can help develop the grads.

“Everyone gets the chance to develop their clinical skills as we can support that and, because of our caseload, we see so much that we can keep here, which helps that process as well. When our vets go to local practices or speak to their friends, they realise how skilled they are. Because they’re in a high-performing team, they don’t necessarily know how skilled they are because they are in a bit of a bubble here with us, where they get pushed to develop and improve all the time – both the vets and the nurses.

“And now we’re able to do even more because we can run four procedures at once, three in the theatre, dental and potentially imaging as well, so my nurses are excited and the vets are really excited, too. And of course, everyone enjoys the fact that we are not all fighting for space all the time.”

Business booming

Despite it being such a busy practice, the air was one of calm efficiency throughout the building when VBJ visited last month. All phone calls are now taken in a separate office, leaving the reception team free to engage with clients, while a new WhatsApp-based messenger system has freed up clinical time as clients are now able to book appointments, make med requests and pay bills online.

Jenny added: “We’ve gone from 10 messages a day to more than 100 a day on WhatsApp, just in the past few weeks. Those messages come into a central hub and you log in. And you can have messages allocated to yourself, so I might send the message to one of my clients about blood results.

“They will then message back and forward, and I get a notification there’s a message for me, and you can set it up to notify your email, which is great.

“But there are so many things that we love about this building and, although we have not been here very long, I am already wondering how we managed in the old place. It instantly just feels really calm. It instantly feels more relaxed. Of course, there has been the odd teething problem, but life is good and business is good, and I fully expect our revenues to increase by 20% to 30% easily next year, now that we are here.”

Jenny and Davinia have built the practice into what it is today by being focused on providing the very best first opinion veterinary care round the clock, and by building highly competent and motivated clinical and administrative teams.

Another crucial factor, however, has been the application of some seriously astute business acumen, something Jenny feels not enough vets – particularly female vets – are comfortable shouting about.

She added: “I do think there’s a little bit of embarrassment within the profession about shouting about your success as a businessperson. And why shouldn’t we if we run a successful business? Why shouldn’t we be making profit off that, which enables us to have a good lifestyle outside of work, as well?

“This business supports the entire family and that’s important, so I think we shouldn’t be embarrassed about shouting about success and profitability in the business.

“Also, it was interesting on the opening day: there was myself, Davinia, then we had Louise Stonier, who is chief operating officer of the vet group and then Lyssa [McGowan], who is chief executive of Pets at Home, so it was all women. I think it is a massive statement for the profession.”