INTENSIVE CARE SERVICES

Our Intensive Care services are available at Underwood, Jindalee, and Carrara to provide intensive nursing care 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. At Underwood, this is provided by the Pet ICU (Pet Intensive Care Unit).

Our vets and nurses are dedicated to providing the best possible intensive care and ensuring that each pet receives that little extra TLC that they need to help them recover. We have access to equipment and expertise required to provide life saving care to critically ill patients.

Each individual kennel has been fully equipped with heating, padded bedding, oxygen supply, and monitoring devices to help support your pet.

P.I.C.U. has the capability to continuously monitor arterial and central venous blood pressure; oxygen saturation; end tidal CO2; ECG and continuous temperature.

This is important for our very sick septic or ventilated patients.

Nutrition can be very important to the recovery of critical patients; however it is often these patients that will not, or cannot eat. P.I.C.U. is able to provide nutritional support either by intravenous nutrition or via a feeding tube.

P.I.C.U. has 2 life support ventilators for those cases in which an animal is having severe breathing problems that do not improve with oxygen therapy alone.

Animals with very severe lung bruising secondary to being hit by a car, animals with severe pneumonia, snake envenomations, or tick paralysis are some of the common conditions requiring this intervention.

P.I.C.U. can perform point of care testing including blood glucose, ketone levels, blood gas analysis, packed cell volume, total protein, lactate, and coagulation.

P.I.C.U. also has access to the Veterinary Specialist Services in house laboratory as well as all out of house laboratory testing.

P.I.C.U. has blood products for dogs and cats in the hospital for patients in life threatening situations requiring transfusions. These may be necessary in cases of trauma, bleeding tumours, severe infection or toxicities such as rat poison.

Dogs like humans, sometimes need life-saving blood and plasma transfusions. Blood products are a precious resource that have a relatively short shelf life. Therefore we need a steady supply of canine blood donors to maintain our blood bank to help those animals that are recovering from surgery, illness or poisoning.

For information on our BLOOD DONOR program, please email us by clicking here. You can also open or download the P.I.C.U. Bloodbank flyer by clicking here.

To learn more about our specialist intensive care team and the locations you'll find them, please visit the pages below:

Underwood

Dr Ellie Leister
BVSc FANZVCS
Specialist - Veterinary Emergency and Critical Care
Pet Intensive Care Unit

Our internal medicine team also manages intensive care at our Carrara and Jindalee hospitals.