At Bennachie Equine Vets we are committed to providing a personal and reliable service. As part of this, it is important to us that we build long-lasting relationships with you, our clients, to enable us to provide the highest standard of care possible and the best outcomes for you, your animal, and us. We will be as transparent as possible about our services, but if you have any questions about any of our terms and conditions please just ask.
Fees
We set our prices based on a fair, clear, pricing structure, and are happy to discuss this with you if required. As a registered client, we will endeavour to inform you in a timely manner of any key service price increases that are likely to affect you.
Your animal’s welfare is always our priority, however we will also be considerate of any practical or financial constraints you may have when creating our diagnostic and treatment plans. Please be open with us and talk to us if you have concerns – we can usually propose a different approach that better fits your circumstances.
Payment Terms
As we are currently a small business with minimal support staff, we ask that payment is made at the time of the appointment. This allows us to keep our prices as competitive as possible, rather than spending time and money on debt collection.
If this is not going to be possible for any reason, we ask that you let us know in advance of the appointment. We are happy to work with you to put an alternative plan in place, provided this is agreed and confirmed in advance of carrying out any work.
We recognise that urgent treatment can be unexpected. In some circumstances we may be able to offer extended payment terms for urgent care – please talk to us about this at the start of the appointment (before treatment is administered) if necessary.
Insurance claims
Please let us know at your appointment if you will be making an insurance claim and what your cover limitations are. Our treatment options are never altered due to the fact a patient is insured, we will have the same discussions with you either way. However, awareness of the cover limitations allows us to have better informed discussions with you about potential future outcomes and ongoing requirements.
Indirect claims (where you pay the bill and are reimbursed by the insurance company) are welcomed with no additional charge and we will be happy to provide you with invoices and clinical reports as required.
Direct claims (where you pay the excess up front and the insurance company pay us the remainder directly) are fully supported, but do incur a small admin fee due to the significant extra time and paperwork involved for us. Please ask if you would like to know more.
Estimates
We are happy to provide an estimate in advance of any work carried out. Please be aware that this is an estimate not a quote, and there will often be a price range given to you rather than a definite figure. The final price of many services depends on factors such as the amount of drugs required, or the number of individual procedures necessary to reach a conclusion, which can be difficult to predict in advance. If it becomes apparent during an appointment that the cost will vary significantly from the estimate given, we will make you aware of it at the time and agree on the most appropriate course of action before continuing.
Prescription regulations
Prescribing “prescription-only medications” (also called POM-Vs) to animals is legally tightly controlled. As a result of this legislation, which was updated in 2023, we have to comply with the following rules:
- Any animal we prescribe to must be ‘under our care’ – registered with us and previously seen by us.
- We must carry out a clinical assessment of the current condition before prescribing, in order to justify that the medication is required. This is usually a physical exam, but in some situations a phone call and photo/video evidence may be acceptable.
- For prescription of antibiotics, whether oral medication or topical creams, we MUST carry out a physical examination.
- For certain anti-parasite medications we MUST carry out a physical examination. Please note this does not include regular wormers which can be bought without prescriptions.
- For controlled medication such as gabapentin, we MUST carry out a physical examination and can only prescribe for a maximum of 28 days at a time.
We also have to follow a prescribing method known as ‘The Cascade’, which legally enforces the prescription of medication licensed for horses in preference to unlicensed (and usually cheaper) alternatives.
It is a common misconception that vets create these rules in order to generate extra income – we don’t! We need to abide by the laws if we want to be able to carry on providing you with veterinary care – which we obviously do!
For long term medication of chronic conditions, all the above prescribing rules still apply. Each case is different and will be judged individually, but the minimum level of assessment for prescribing to the most stable of cases is deemed to be a physical exam every 12 months, and a phone call with video update every six months.
Written Prescriptions
We want to keep our drug prices as low as we can – it is not our aim to profiteer from drug sales. The small amount of mark up we put on simply covers the cost of ordering, shipping, storing and disposing of the medication. You can therefore rest assured that if a drug is expensive to you, it’s because it’s expensive to us.
That being said, there will be times where we cannot compete with the large online pharmacies – we can’t even buy in the drugs at the price they are selling them at. In these situations we are very happy to write you a prescription so you can buy directly from them. As a prescription is a legal document that needs to be created carefully, we will charge a prescription fee to cover our time.
Vaccination reminders
We endeavour to send out vaccination reminders via email. Please be aware that this is as a courtesy and is not a guaranteed service. It remains your responsibility to stay up to date with your animal’s vaccinations, whether or not you get a reminder. For competition purposes, it also remains your responsibility to ensure compliance. We are always happy for you to contact us for advice on vaccination schedules.
Our relationship with you
By registering as a client you agree to enter into a partnership with us. Hopefully this will be a long lasting one we are all happy with! This partnership requires the following commitments from both sides:
Out of hours
We provide a 24/7 emergency service to our registered first-opinion clients. We will only register first-opinion clients within our designated practice area, to ensure that we can provide a reliable and timely emergency service. Please bear in mind that we provide this service ourselves, so please keep it sustainable for us by only using for genuine emergencies.
Medical records
In order to provide the best care possible, any vet involved in treating your animal needs to have full access to their medical history. Without it, your animal is at risk of missed diagnoses or inappropriate treatment plans. We strongly encourage you to be registered with one primary vet practice, with all your animal’s medical history kept there together.
With the exception of referrals/second opinions, when you register with us, you are agreeing to appoint us as that primary practice, and we will request your animal’s medical history from your previous practice to keep on their record. After registration with us, if for any reason you need to see a different practice on a temporary basis, we will happily arrange for the relevant clinical history to be sent to them, and in turn they should send a report back to us.
Other practices should not be accepting registrations without requesting this clinical history, however we are aware that sometimes it happens. If veterinary treatment is directly sought by you from a different practice, we ask that you inform us so that we can request a report from them if not provided. If we become aware that this process is repeatedly not being followed, we will assume you no longer wish to remain in this partnership and will remove your registration.
We understand that situations change, and if you feel a different practice would be a better fit as your primary care vets, you may notify us at any time and we will send your clinical history to them and remove your registration with us.
Referrals
If either party feels that a second opinion is necessary for a specific case, for example that of a specialist, we will assist you with this. We are happy to advise on choice of clinician/referral centre, but ultimately the decision is yours. We will make the referral for you and share all relevant history and diagnostics with your chosen practice.
Most referral centres will not accept cases directly from you and will instead require a formal referral from us. The easiest way for you to see any other clinician is to talk to us about it – we don’t need a reason, we just need to know where you are going and what they end up doing. If we are involved in the referral process there will be no nasty surprises if you need our follow up care further down the line, and we will all (you, us and the referral practice) have open communication when it’s needed.
Teamwork
Our whole practice works as a team to care for your horse, and you are very much a part of that team. We share the same goal and want to work together to secure the best possible outcome for you and your horse. Our support staff, whether full or part-time, office-based or on the road, are every bit as important in that team as our vets are. Please be kind and respectful to all members of the team at all times, and we will do the same for you. We have a zero-tolerance approach to any form of abuse, and reserve the right to withdraw our services, including those for emergencies, with no warning if abuse is encountered.
Of course for the team approach to be a success it is vital that communication stays open, and if you have any concerns or complaints we want to hear from you and address them. Please see our complaints policy below.
Complaints Policy
We always welcome constructive feedback, and will use it to facilitate the continued improvement of our service. However we are not flawless, and if you feel dissatisfied with our service for any reason we would like to hear about it directly from you. Please contact the office in the first instance, and we will put you in touch with the most appropriate member of staff, likely one of the Directors. We will endeavour to listen, understand and address your concerns – it is our experience that most complaints arise from a lack of communication and can be resolved successfully for all concerned if addressed promptly.
As we are a small team, we respectfully ask that social media is not your first line of approach if you have a complaint – this can be extremely distressing for our staff members, and can remain so long after the initial complaint has come to a satisfactory conclusion. We are strong advocates of the “Not One More Vet” campaign, a charity dedicated to suicide prevention in the veterinary profession, and it is well known that online harassment has a significant impact on mental health. We will not engage with harassing or accusatory comments on social media and will immediately withdraw all services from the proponent. The safety and wellbeing of our staff is our number one concern in this situation. As stated above, we will not belittle your concerns and will always give them our full attention if brought to us via the appropriate channel.