The quality of life of your pet is based on a number of factors that influence their overall physical and mental well-being. Illness and aging can detrimentally affect your pet’s quality of life.

We will assess your pet’s current quality of life, taking into account their health, emotional status and comfort level. A full veterinary examination will be undertaken, and current medications, home care, home setting and medical history will be evaluated.

We will have an in depth discussion addressing your concerns, questions and wants for your pet, while also considering your financial, emotional, physical and time constraints.

Together we will establish how comfortable your pet is and together we will decide on the appropriate management option(s) for you and your fur baby.

During palliative care, you will have access to an online quality of life assessment program. This will help guide and monitor your pet’s progress.

The program is designed to tell us how your pet feels about their current circumstances and quality of life. It does this by analysing your answers to simple questions about your pet’s behaviour and only takes about 5 minutes to complete.

The program will be set at intervals that suit your lifestyle to help monitor how your pet is doing. This will aid in spacing vet visits appropriately, give you the confidence that we are monitoring your pet’s health and wellbeing between vet visits and provide useful information for your next vet visit.

The program will help to work out whether current management regimes are improving your pet’s quality of life or whether quality of life is declining despite efforts.

We may recommend a vet visit and review of treatment(s) depending on your assessments. You may also seek a vet visit if your pet’s quality of life assessment is declining.

This option is for maintaining quality of life for your pet until end of life where their disease/ailment(s) permits. It focuses on care, improving comfort and alleviating the symptoms and suffering of your pet’s ailment(s) rather than cure.

The aim is twofold: reduce the negative impacts on quality of life such as pain, nausea/vomiting and fear/anxiety; and maximise the positive influences on quality of life such as social interaction, sense of security, relaxation, mental stimulation and sense of control for your fur baby.

For some pet parents palliative care is chosen to maintain quality of life for as long as possible until it declines despite evolving treatment and best efforts.

For others it may be chosen to improve quality of life for a small amount of time so the whole family can be present or a bucket list is complete before end of life.  

After considering your pet’s current quality of life status and other options available, we may find that there is little chance for improvement or that other options are just not viable. In this case the appropriate choice may be to say goodbye in order to ease the suffering of your beloved fur baby.

We are here to support you through the difficult end of life decision making process.