Birstall practice - negligent
As if our cat being really unwell wasn't stressful enough, this practice made the whole experience a lot worse. We had to go here as our vets referred our cat as an emergency to them and I regret letting my cat be treated by this company now. We were referred as an emergency and given an appointment time, which we attended on time and were left waiting for an hour. We were left waiting at least 30 mins to an hour for our subsequent three appointments. We were given an estimate of £1050 which ended up being £1800 (and that didn't even include a proper diagnosis of why our cat's kidneys were failing, they wanted further money for this investigation.) They also carried out a £60 urine test on our cat without our consent and didn't give us the results. We visited initially on a Friday evening and the following night when we visited our cat, there was a massive clump of hair on the steps up to the vets which had been there since the previous night - disgusting. The vet nurse left us waiting 5 minutes when she rook us to the reception desk to pay because she got distracted by a puppy and the receptionist snapped at us "Are you paying then?!" The receptionists were rude and aggressive, lacking empathy and only wanting to take your money. They also messed up our bill, so even though we'd paid and left, I got a call when we got home to say I owed a further £105 "because the vet messed the bill up." We paid for blood results which were meant to take one week to get back but took 11 days and a lot of chasing up to get them. They ordered medication which we paid for and were told would be there the next day. The next day we were told it hadn't arrived because it was past the cut off time for ordering. The following day we were told that it still wasn't in, but that they had a bigger bottle we could have, but it would be an extra £120 for this. They then proceeded to tell my partner they never ordered the smaller bottle of medication we paid for and that they just wanted us to pay for the bigger one they already had in! Unbelievable. Not only is this highly unprofessional but stopping a cat from accessing essential medication because of sheer greed is just cruel. The vet gave us a prescription for some further medication to be obtained from a pharmacy - upon going to order this I was told by Boots the cost - £1,100 for 70ml (!!!) - the tablet version is £10; yet another demonstration of this company not having a grasp of reality. Fortunately we found a new vet for our cat, however the real icing on the cake is that they misdiagnosed her with stage 2 kidney disease a month ago, when in fact our new vet confirmed that she was in the final stages of the disease and sadly she passed away last week. I would suggest avoiding this practice at all costs.
May 30, 2022
Unprompted review