What are the benefits of pre-anaesthetic bloods?
All animals that come in for surgery will undergo a thorough physical exam including inspection of their gum colour and capillary refill time, auscultation of their chest to check for heart murmurs / arrhythmia and assess lung sounds, palpation of their abdomen to ensure nothing abnormal is evident and taking your animal’s temperature. Although these are good measures for picking up potential issues that may affect your pets ability to handle an anaesthetic, it doesn’t give us the “full” picture on the internal health of your pet.
Pre-anaesthetic bloods help us to ensure your pet has no hidden or underlying health problems, which if undetected, could affect the safety of anaesthesia. The tests help to ensure your pets organs are functioning properly, enabling them to properly process and metabolise the anaesthetic agents used. Even young “healthy looking” pets may be hiding symptoms of underlying disease. Testing helps to identify certain underlying disease so we can avoid problems with anaesthesia.
If the pre-anaesthetic testing results are normal, we can proceed with confidence. If not, we can alter the anaesthetic procedure or take other precautions to safeguard your pet’s health.
An added benefit is that we will have a baseline to tell us what is normal for your pet. This baseline can help us differentiate between the ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ from future blood tests.
Although we recommend blood tests for any animal undergoing an anaesthesia, we strongly recommend these for any animal over 8 years of age (over 5 for large breed dogs)!
During your admission consult our veterinary nurse will do a thorough physical examination on your pet and discuss the procedure with you. Please allow 10 mins for your admission consult and consider whether you would like to have pre-anaesthetic bloods done on your animal.
What are the benefits of Intravenous fluids?
IV (intravenous) fluids are recommended to maintain your pet’s blood pressure and decrease the risks of organ damage from decreased blood pressure, prevent dehydration, and to aid in recovery, as well as to provide a life-line in the event of an emergency. Your pet deserves nothing less than excellent care: fluid administration helps to ensure your precious friend’s well-being, and gives peace of mind to both you and your pet’s veterinary team.
We include IV fluids as standard during all routine surgical procedures. We believe this is best practice and pride ourselves on the standard of care we provide to our patients.
