UGA Veterinary School to add mobile vet clinic to assist local shelters

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The University of Georgia College of Veterinary Medicine is set to welcome a new way to serve Athens’ pets: a mobile vet clinic.

The UGA College of Veterinary Medicine’s shelter medicine program received a grant of $750,000 this summer from the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation to build a mobile veterinary clinic, aimed at providing a training opportunity for veterinary students during clinicals and providing veterinary care to animals in the Athens community and beyond.

Mississippi State University was one of the first schools to implement a mobile clinic that provided students with surgical experience. Oregon State University also partnered with Oregon Humane Society, where students not only participated in spay and neuter, but also gained shelter medicine experience.

Spencer Johnston, the department head of Small Animal Medicine and Surgery and a professor at the UGA College of Veterinary Medicine, said that these schools’ initiatives have served as a model for many other institutions, including UGA.

”When we determined that [these initiatives] would be beneficial for the University of Georgia and for our students to particularly gain surgical experience, we also wanted them to have shelter medicine experience,” Johnston said. “So we started exploring opportunities, and that included trying to to develop our own mobile unit.”

“Having this facility that is ours, that we can schedule, that we will be able to stock and maintain and take care of will, of course, be an advantage as well,” Johnston said.

Staci Cannon, a clinical assistant professor of shelter medicine with UGA’s College of Veterinary Medicine, works hands-on with veterinary students in their final year of training, providing them with experiential learning for their clinical rotations. She also works with the Athens Area Humane Society, a local non-profit that provides care for rescued animals and helps train UGA veterinary students.

“Right now, there’s lots of possibilities [for the clinic], which is so exciting,” Cannon said. “There’s a lot of possibilities, depending on the growth of our program, of how this unit could support the university and support the state.”

Cannon said that a lot of the shelters around Georgia are “fragmented,” meaning if animals need surgical care, shelters may have to load the animals in trucks or vans to travel for medical care. The hope for the clinic is that it would provide medical care and surgery on site for shelters as well as expand rotation capacity to provide more opportunities for veterinary students.

Not only will the mobile vet clinic provide a learning experience for students, but it will also work towards pet population control.The mobile vet clinic will be spaying and neutering many shelter animals, and according to Cannon, this is “good preventative care” for the overpopulation of pets that the county deals with on a daily basis.

The mobile clinic is projected to take nine to 12 months to be completed, since each unit is custom built.

Cannon’s expectation for the clinic is that it will consist of two rooms, with one room serving as a surgical suite with enough surgery tables for multiple procedures to take place at once. The other half of the unit, Cannon said, would be a surgical preparatory area for physical examinations, and additional equipment would include anesthesia machines and refrigerators for vaccines.

The primary surgeries students would partake in would be spay and neuter, but some may do soft tissue procedures like mass removals or amputations. One of the goals of the clinic’s work with shelters is for animals to become more healthy and adoptable so they can avoid euthanasia.

“I think that this program is going to provide a really direct benefit to our pet population,” Cannon said.