Over the past 12 months we have seen an increasing amount of requests being sent to our vets for advice in the form of images and videos posted on social media / WhatsApp. We had anticipated the development of “telemedicine” to become a significant component of how we practice and subsequently prescribe advice. Until now we have been predominately giving advice for free as a gesture of “good will”. However, we have come to notice that some of our team are partaking in lengthy discussions and reviewing multiple images and videos each day. Quite often this is also done when they are not at work and across the team amounts to several hours per day.

Due to the increasing & overwhelming amount of requests for advice in this format, it is now practice policy to place a small surcharge on this advice to cover the costs of the advice given, the transfer of the data to your file and transcribing the advice to maintain contemporaneous notes.

We will advise all clients when images or video are sent through that the surcharge is applicable if they wish to continue with the discussion thread.

We have tried to keep the costs nominal at £10 for images & £15 for video reviews ( irrespective of the number of images / videos sent within in a single message ).

We hope you understand the necessity for this charge and please do not hesitate to contact us if there are any queries.