The Future of Portland Vets
Portland Vets already offers a much greater Out Of Hours (OOH) emergency service than most first opinion vets in our respective communities, but it’s still not fully 24/7/365 emergency service. We are on a mission to one day have a 24hr fully staffed emergency service for our clients (and other vet surgeries clients), but this can only come with an increase in the size of Portland Vets due to the cost and complication of 24hr care. It requires enough emergencies every week to cover the costs of staffing these difficult and unsociable shifts.
Our Director, George, spends most of his time trying to grow Portland Vets, so in the future we can bring to life our full emergency service and expand our in-house surgical skills. The growth will mostly come through opening/building more surgeries in Surrey and Sussex. (2025 will see a new surgery in Crawley)A merger or acquisition of a private like-minded veterinary practice (i.e. would want their practice to be part of an Employee Owned Trust (EOT)) may also be considered. Horsham, Haywards Heath, Crawley, Dorking, Redhill and Reigate are towns Portland Vets would like to eventually be able to offer their employee owned veterinary services and George intends to get Portland Vets some way down this path before he retires.
Our plans for organic growth are possible through the development over the years of our culture and processes for training and development of undergraduate nurses and vets through to graduation, they then start their formal working career with Portland Vets. Now as their employer there is still no let up by Portland Vets on the continual training and development of these graduates. The mixture of agreed progression expectations coupled with flexibility, support, good work life balance and appropriate remuneration means we have very low staff turnover and an increasing amount of home grown talent. The management team of Portland Vets is proud of our care and attention in this area which has resulted in all 7 graduate vets we have employed since 2018 still happily working for Portland Vets.
