Littleton West Animal Hospital offers pet exams and vaccines designed to help improve the health and longevity of your pet. There are a number of diseases and illnesses which our examinations can detect and potentially prevent through regular annual checks ups.
The Importance of the Exam for your Dog or Cat
With all of the options out there for vaccine clinics and quick check-ups, the importance of the annual wellness exam for cats and dogs is being missed. A complete exam is not only the physical exam portion of the appointment, but the education and communication for the pet owners to learn about and understand the health of their pets. The physical exam can pick up many possible unknown problems that our four-legged kids can not tell us about. The conversation that occurs after that portion is just as important. At Littleton West Animal Hospital, our main focus is on education and communication with the caretakers of our patients. We are looking out for the best interest of our patients while creating a partnership with their caretakers, to make informed decisions together, based on the knowledge and understanding of their pets needs and the goals for optimal health and wellness. This partnership is referred to as “Relationship Centered Care”.
We promote relationship centered care to provide optimum care individualized for your pet(s). This means a cooperative effort, a partnership, between you and our team, based on a thorough history, physical exam, age, breed and risk factors. Once a treatment plan is developed, and decided upon, we can do most everything in the exam room and send home or email a report of the exam and recommendations for continued health care. Each pet is an individual and is treated based on what is in their best interest, with their caretakers involved every step of the way. We know how important it is for you to feel involved, as well as understand what is best for your pets. We want the same for our own.
Our goal is to provide an environment with the least anxiety possible for both the patients and for the owners. We have separate exam rooms for dogs and cats so that mainly cats do not feel more anxious if they can smell a dog odor in their exam room. We also have a window in the cat exam room which helps keep their attention, a warm bed with toys and cat pheromone spray to decrease anxiety. We use gentle handling as much as possible to get the treatments done that we need to do. Annual exams for cats are very important because they are good a hiding disease until it’s progressed too far. In the exams we often find abnormalities which may indicate the need for treatments which can slow or even stop the progression of disease and extend a cat’s life.
Both dogs and cats need annual wellness exams until they reach their senior years, in which they need an exam every 6 months. The needs of each pet are different every year and together we can decide on the best plan for their optimal health.
Littleton West Animal Hospital offers caring and professional veterinary exams and vaccines for dogs and cats in Littleton, Colorado and the Denver Metro.
