Emergency & Critical Care

• 24 hour Fluid Therapy
  
• 24 hour Patient Monitoring
  
• 24 hour Pain Management/Opiate CRI
  
• Oxygen Therapy
  
• Central Venous Pressure Monitoring
  
• Blood Pressure Monitoring
  
• Toxicity Treatment
  
  
• Snake Bite Envenomation Treatment
  
• Cardiac Resuscitation / Post-Resuscitation Care
  
• Enteral Feeding
  
• Electrocardiography
  
• Ventilator Therapy
  
• Transfusion Therapy
  
• Trauma/Emergency Surgery
  
• Ultrasonography/FNA/Biopsy
  
• Echocardiography (Color Flow Doppler)
  
• Dialysis (CRRT)
  
  
• Endoscopy
  
• Colonoscopy
  
• Tonometry

The Specialty of Emergency and Critical Care

The veterinary specialist in emergency and critical care is trained through a formal 3 year residency program to perform essentially two different but related specialties. After the completion of their residency training, the veterinarian must pass both written and oral examinations by the Veterinary College of Emergency & Critical Care before they are considered a "Diplomate" or "Board Certified." The board certified emergency & critical care specialist is at the same time, emergency specialists, and intensivists.

The easiest way to understand the veterinary specialty of emergency and critical care is to divide it into its two parts. The first part is emergency specialist. As an emergency specialist we are trained to handle patients who become ill when their primary veterinarian is unavailable and we are also trained to handle the most life threatening emergencies that can occur any time of the day or night. These emergencies include but are not limited to animals being hit by cars, falling from heights, sustaining gunshot wounds or lacerations, having intractable vomiting, having trouble breathing, having a fever or infection, seizuring, and many others. These specialists act as the ER doctors for your pets, just as ER doctors care for you at your local hospital when your doctor is unavailable or your condition is extremely life threatening.

In this specialty we are also trained as intensivists. An intensivist is the doctor in charge of monitoring and caring for the patients who are in the intensive care unit (ICU). Often the patients with a severe, life threatening emergency wind up in the ICU because their illness or injury puts them in a position where their physical condition often changes by the minutes or hours. Research which has grown out of the treatment of people shows that outcomes for these critically ill people improve when they are cared for by expert intensivists and critical care nurses. One of the most important strategies currently employed in human medicine to dramatically improve health care and decrease the cost is to utilize intensivists who are present in the ICU during the day, with the immediate availability of an appropriately trained alternate the rest of the time. We believe that the same is true for our non-human patients. Having advanced training in the treatment of these critically ill patients helps us to anticipate problems which may develop before they become life threatening.

Dr. Deanna Purvis, VMD, DACVECC is C.A.R.E. Hospitals Chief of Staff and Chief of Emergency & Critical Care medicine. It is a rare privilege to have a Board Certified Intensivist on staff and, in fact, Dr. Purvis is the only intensivist in two counties of California's Central Coast (Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo Counties). It is also a rare privilege to have all six of C.A.R.E. Hospital’s emergency veterinarians (staffing the ER and ICU 24 hours a day) having completed the advanced training of a veterinary internship in medicine and surgery. Therefore, at C.A.R.E. Hospital, the minimum training of any doctor that you will care for one of your pets is a one year post veterinary school internship. We thank you for choosing C.A.R.E. Hospital.

For more info about our Board Certified Emergency & Critical Care Specialist, please see Dr. Deanna Purvis, VMD, DACVECC

Dr. Purvis providing dialysis to a beloved poodle