Equicall expands to cover half of England and Wales

EQUICALL, the CVS Group out-of-hours service for equine clinics, has this month expanded and now covers approximately half of England and Wales. With the recent addition to the team of a veterinary surgeon in Leicestershire, the service now stretches all the way from Cornwall to Alnorthumbria in England, and across the South of Wales. Equicall started in January 2019 and has grown over the past six years into a team of 35 equine vets and is currently one of the largest equine practices in the country. It works with 82 equine clinics throughout the UK, including both corporate and independent practices. Equicall provides a dedicated out-of-hours service for its clients’ daytime veterinary teams. It works closely with the practices and sees itself as an extension of their daytime service. Cover typically starts from 5pm to 8.30am on weekdays, and from 5pm Friday through to 8.30am Monday for weekend cover. Bank holidays are also covered on rotation. Vets are positioned carefully, geographically overlapping each other to ensure that the time to reach a patient and client is kept to a minimum. It also means that if one vet is busy, there are other vets available who can move in to help creating a supportive team atmosphere.

Equicall helps vets maintain a healthy work-life balance.

One of the most important factors is the relationships Equicall vets have with the practices that they cover; the aim is that they are integrated within the practice team and providing an extension of the daytime service rather than a stand-alone service. In addition, the Equicall vet team has turned what has previously been perceived as an isolated role into a team focused approach to OOH cover. In conjunction with Equicall, a partner call answering service Equicomms was set up to bridge the gap between clients calling and messages passed to an on-call vet. The Equicomms call centre is now staffed solely by 25 veterinary nurses who can offer basic advice, triage calls and reassure clients. Its professional service focuses on two-way communication with clinics to ensure a quality level of care for clients and provide support for vets on the ground. It has grown independently of Equicall and now works with a complete mixture of large and companion animal practices. Equicall’s clinical directors James Hopkins and Ian Bellis said: “When we had the idea to develop Equicall we knew that every night a large number of equine vets working for different practices would cover the same geography. “Not only was this an overlap of resources, financially it was rarely profitable for the practices to provide the service themselves. “There were also challenges associated with practices sharing rotas, so we hoped that an autonomous service would help benefit the practices and we have been very lucky and grateful that the service has grown beyond expectation in the past six years. “Our service means that daytime clinics are able to run a reduced OOH rota. It puts balanced parameters on their hours of work and helps them to achieve a work-life balance. This colleague wellbeing is obviously so important to equine clinics.” Equicall is part of the CVS Equine Group. For further information visit www.cvs-equine.com