Urgent Care Veterinary Partners (UCVP) has opened in Madison to provide after-hours care to Lake Country’s pets.
UCVP is housed inside Main Street Vet, joining the practice and its boarding/grooming facility, The Lodge, at 1311 Eatonton Rd. Hours of operation are 5 p.m. to 10 p.m. on Fridays and 1 p.m. to 10 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays.
According to General Manager Cammie Harris, Main Street’s veterinarians saw the need for a clinic like UCVP after they added urgent care services to their regular appointment schedule last year and stayed busy.
Before Main Street Vet added the services, the nearest urgent care locations were PriorityPet in Watkinsville, the University of Georgia Veterinary Teaching Hospital in Athens, East Metro Animal Emergency Clinic in Covington, and BluePearl Pet Hospital in Augusta.
“[We decided to open UCVP] to offer the service to the surrounding communities because there wasn’t anything in the area,” Harris said. “This is a new vein of the vet industry, so we’re starting to see [urgent care clinics] pop up more and more and more.”
UCVP aims to be more affordable than other urgent care facilities, with exam fees starting at $139. The Madison clinic offers on-call services, including bloodwork, x-rays, and surgeries, and also fills prescriptions at its onsite pharmacy, too.
Harris said the goal isn’t to take business from other veterinary clinics in the area, but to offer an extra service when they — and Main Street Vet — are closed.
“We’ve tried to make our hours so that the urgent care is open when [other vets] are closed and when we’re closed, so we don’t cannibalize our business,” she explained.
According to Harris, UCVP’s hours will likely be expanded to weeknights once renovations at Main Street Vet are completed later this spring. Upon completion, the facility will have an expanded treatment area and holding area, plus an isolation area with its own separate access for patients with contagious diseases.
“Medicine is always changing, so you've got to kind of move along with the times and update things to stay ahead of the game,” Harris shared about the renovation. “One of our core values is ‘kaizen,’ which is a Japanese term that means constant improvement. One of the things that we live by is, every day, what can we do better or differently to improve services, customer care, patient care.”
For more information about the urgent care clinic, visit the “Urgent Care Veterinary Partners” Facebook page, or call 706-342-3389. Dr. Emily Oliver runs the clinic, with on-call help from Drs. Mark Hibbard, James Williams, and Amy Reynolds.