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Cat Clinic

Lime Trees Vets' high-quality Cat Friendly Clinic

Anyone with a cat is aware of their unique characteristics, habits, and temperaments. Though we are cat-loving vets, many of our patients are not vet-loving cats! For them, a visit to the practice is often stressful: being put in a carrier for the car journey, the smells of the waiting room, the sight of strangers, the sound of barking dogs. Seeing our cats upset is difficult and becomes as stressful for us pet owners as it is for our pet!

We want to help.

Lime Trees Vets has always aimed to provide the best possible care to all animals under its roof, and for cats, a feline-only clinic brings excellent care. This clinic is unique in Staffordshire, and one of around 20 in the whole of the UK.

The Lime Trees Cat Clinic is run by vets and nurses who have a special interest in cats and who have or are studying for further qualifications in this area. We are the familiar faces you already know, who are proud to be cat people too! We know that quality care takes time, which is why all our vet consultations and nurse clinics are a minimum of 20 minutes. Extended consultations mean we can spend more time on gentle handling and getting acquainted with your feline companions.

Our vets and nurses have worked together to redesign key elements of the practice with cats in mind. Everything from cat parks in the waiting room, decoration in the consult room, layout of the wards, and equipment in the theatre rooms have been ticked off as cat-friendly. We are an ISFM Gold Clinic, an accolade with rigorous criteria we are proud to have achieved.

 

The Lime Trees Cat Clinic is able to care for your cat through health as well as illness, with the team offering wellness clinics for kittens, adults, elderly cats, and those with health conditions such as arthritis or chronic kidney disease.

 

We look forward to continuing to build trusting partnerships with our clients, and can’t wait to show you just how great the Lime Trees Cat Clinic is for you and your feline family member.

We are very proud that the Lime Trees Cat Clinic is an ISFM Gold Clinic.

When we opened the Lime Trees Cat Clinic, it was important to us to show how high our standards of care are. This is why we aspired to be an ISFM Cat Friendly Gold Clinic.

ISFM is the International Society of Feline Medicine. They promote high standards of cat care, and have an award scheme with three levels: Bronze, Silver, and Gold. These awards reflect the level of facilities and steps taken to make a vet practice as cat-friendly as possible. Our Meir Park hospital has been a Silver Clinic for many years, but wanted the Lime Trees Cat Clinic to achieve the highest award.

  • Lime Trees Cat Clinic consult rooms are only used for cats and are modified with felines in mind. Even the walls are painted in calming colours!
  • We use cat-friendly handling techniques to minimise their stress levels
  • Our waiting room has shelves for your cat’s carrier so they can look out from a height, and barriers to prevent disease transmission
  • Our hospital wards have larger cages with platforms and hideaways to keep cats comfy during their stay
  • We keep odours, bright lights, and loud noises to a minimum
  • We have top of the range equipment, like a dental x-ray machine to optimise our feline dentistry
  • Our staff engage with Continuous Professional Development to stay up to date, and cases are discussed at regular clinical meetings to share our knowledge.

These are just some of the steps we have taken to be able to provide the highest standard of veterinary care in the most comfortable environment possible. Gold Status is one way to show how much this means to us, but we want you to come and see for yourself!

Book an Appointment

Services available at Lime Trees Cat Clinic

20-minute consultations

Longer consultations allow more time for your cat to acclimatise to the consulting room, reducing stress levels for both owner and cat. It also allows more time for discussion and a gentler examination of your cat without feeling rushed.

Nurse Clinics

Our passionate team of nurses will be running clinics to help with you to care for you cat as well as possible, no matter that their age or what condition they have. They will give you guidance on nutrition, environment enrichment, behavioural advice and much more. Nurse consultations include:

  • Weight clinics
  • Renal clinics (for cats with chronic kidney disease)
  • Diabetes clinics
  • Senior clinics
  • Physiotherapy

Please call the practice for further details.

24-Hour Hospital Care

If your cat needs hospitalisation for their treatment, they will be transferred to our 24/7 hospital at Meir Park. They will be looked after by vets and nurses trained in emergency and critical care, so will be in safe hands.

In-house laboratory testing

At the Lime Trees Cat Clinic we are able to perform a wide range of blood tests without the need to send the blood away to an external laboratory. This speeds up the diagnostic process and is vital in emergencies.

Blood tests:

  • Haematology (to check red blood cells and white blood cells)
  • Biochemistry (to check parameters of organ function, including blood glucose, electrolytes, kidney and liver levels)
  • Thyroid hormone testing (over-active thyroid is common in older cats)
  • Emergency parameter testing (EPOC test)
  • Pancreatitis testing (fPL test)
  • Heart disease testing (pro-BNP test)
  • FIV and FeLV (two serious infectious diseases) testing

Other diagnostic tests:

  • Urine analysis using a computer to check for blood, bacteria or crystals
  • Doppler blood pressure (40% of cats over 7 years old have high blood pressure)
  • Microscopy to look at samples close-up, including ear swabs, skin scrapes, and fine needle aspirates from lumps

Advanced imaging facilities

We have a full range of imaging equipment to help us diagnose medical and surgical conditions:

Digital Radiography

Our X-ray machine can be used to assess your cat’s skeleton and to look for problems in the chest and the abdomen. This test is used when investigating illness, or in emergencies such as after a road traffic accident to show extent of the injuries.

Dental Radiography

Taking x-rays of the teeth is especially important during feline dental procedures. Our dental x-ray machine means we can assess the health of the tooth roots hidden by the gums, helping teeth which need to be extracted. The dental x-ray machine uses tiny x-ray plates that are placed in your cat’s mouth whilst under general anaesthetic.

Ultrasonography and Echocardiography

Our ultrasound machine is used to assess the internal organs. The liver, stomach, spleen, kidneys, intestines and bladder can all be visualised and problems detected without having to perform surgery. If we want to get a sample from one of these organs to send away for analysis, we can use the ultrasound machine to guide a needle to the right place. It can also be used to check for pregnancy.

Using a specialised cardiac probe we can look inside your cat’s heart. Assessment of the size of the heart chambers is essential when diagnosing heart disease in cats. This may be done without the need to sedate your cat - one of our nurses will give them cuddles during the procedure!

Endoscopy

Sometimes only looking inside your cat will give us an answer, and we have a piece of kit to do just that. At the Lime Trees Cat Clinic our bronchoscope allows us to look at the back of cats’ throats and down into the lungs. As well as removing any objects which shouldn’t be there, such as grass blades, we can also take sample to diagnose diseases like asthma or lungworm.

Within the Lime Trees group we also have access to a gastroscope to assess inside the gastro-intestinal tract, taking samples or even removing things your cat shouldn’t have eaten.

Computer Tomography (CT)

Within the Lime Trees group we have a top-of-the-range CT scanner. This advanced equipment uses x-ray beams to build a 3D image of the organs and bones, giving better detail than radiography or ultrasonography. It also allows us to look inside the brain for patients with neurological conditions.

Meet some of our Cat Clinic vets and nurses

Jodie Tanner - Veterinary Surgeon

Jodie Tanner

Jodie Tanner BVetMed GPCert(FelP) PgC(FVS) MRCVS Veterinary Surgeon
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Amy Thompson - Veterinary Nurse

Amy Thompson

Amy Thompson RVN Veterinary Nurse
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Nicola Whitelock - Veterinary Nurse

Nicola Whitelock

Nicola Whitelock RVN ISFMCertFN Veterinary Nurse
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Rebecca Medcalf - Veterinary Surgeon

Rebecca Medcalf

Rebecca Medcalf BVMSci MRCVS Veterinary Surgeon
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Client Education Meetings

Client Education Meetings

Book onto one of our Client Education Meetings at the Cat Clinic