Turkey

PETCODE ANIMAL HOSPITAL; where our dreams came true

Just before starting to make our new  animal hospital I asked my collegues to write me about their dreams. I was not wondering what we can do,  I was wondering  about a small animal practioner’s dreams . It is not easy to understand the meaning of these dreams for a vet working  in Germany, Holland or England but I am sure you can understand  how important this is for us. In countries like Turkey or in Balkans, there is always some thing is absent while we are practicing. I asked the same question to some of my patient owners. I was sure that as the people who love their pets they would also have dreams about a perfect hospital.  I knew that it was impossible to make a perfect hospital  but I believed that all these dreams will guide us  to create a close one.

After I collected all these notes from my friends  I read them may be a hundred  times. I saw that some of my friends  was dreaming about wider and bigger spaces to practice, some of them was dreaming about high technologies  like MRI and CT, some about a better laboratory and etc. The list was so long but we did our best to make them true one by one. Of course we could not manage to make them all but we are still on work and continue .That is why I am not calling PetCode as  “the perfect animal hospital” I am calling us as “The hospital where the dreams come true.”

Now I will try to tell you about Petcode, the sum of  our dreams.

Our Petcode Animal Hospital is serving  in a 1400 square meter building and it is physically  the biggest animal hospital in Turkey. We are using 2 different entrance and 3 separate parts in Petcode. In polyclinics section you can find our account office, secretary and information desk, pharmacy, a wide waiting room with different waiting areas  for dog  and cat owners, two examination rooms for dogs and two examination rooms for cats, physical therapy and rehabilitation service with a hydrotherapy pool, hemodialysis unit, pet coiffeur and meeting room. In hospital section we have emergency entrance, emercency waiting and examination room, computered radiography, colored doppler ultrasonography, electrocardiography and office rooms, hospitalization section, central examination room for hospitalized patients, reanimation rooms,  oral health and dentistry unit, surgery preperation room, half sterile room and full sterile operation room. You can enter our hospital’s third section  with our elevator and here you can find computered tomography, restaurant  and, changing rooms for our staff, laudry and storage.

In PetCode Animal Hospital we believe that  “ Cats are not small dogs ” and  with  this policy we divided our wide waiting room  to 2 parts,  one is for dog owners and the other  is for cat owners. There are 4 routine examination rooms in our hospital and 2 of them is for cats and 2 for dogs. Dogs are never alouded to enter cat examination rooms just to reduce the stress of cats. We have special hiding places in our cat examination rooms so when they jump and escape from the examination table we never try to catch them because we already know  where they will enter.

“Physical Therapy and Rehabilitation”(FTR)  is one of the most popular branches in veterinary medicine all over the world. The high percentage of geriatric animals among the pet population,and the important  tendency of dogs and cats to obesity is increasing the risk of osteoarthritis. Osteoarthritis  creates the main need for physical therapy and rehabilitation in most cases. The increasing  number of advanced surgeries we are performing  is also increasing the demand of patient owners for a better and faster recovery period. So physical therapy and rehabilitation is becoming more and more popular every year and of course we made a big investment  for FTR in PetCode. Our hospital has a hydrotherapy pool supported with a lifting crane for paraplegic animals. We have a  gait analysis system which shows given weight to each extremity quantitatively . Our treadmil, electrotherapy, therapeutic ultrasound, laser therapy and laser acupunture systems are the other feautures of Petcode FTR service.

Petcode Hemodialysis Service is the only hemodialysis  chance for dogs  in Turkey so patients with kidney failure and differenttoxications are coming to us everywhere from Turkey. Of course keeping a chronic renal failure patient alive just with hemodialysis is so expensive and not efficient and logical most of the time but we are mostly helping acute renal failure patients successfuly. Our hemodialysis machine is just suitable for patients over 15kg and we are performing peritoneal dialysis for our smaller dogs and cats.

According to American Animal Hospital Association veterinary dentistry creates the biggest income for every small animal practice in USA and in Petcode we made a serious  investment for veterinary dentistry. We are not only performing tartar cleaning and teeth extractions we are also using intraoral cameras, taking x-rays,  performing fillings, coverings and implants.

In PetCode we are  closing our polyclinic section everyday at 20.00 but emergency entrance is open for the rest of the night with an on duty veterinarian and a veterinary technician. When we had a surgical emergency we always call all our surgical team and perform the surgery.

During day time all our staff  pass the hospital section  door with a card reader. Our patient owners are not alouded to enter to the hospital section by themselves and even for visiting for their patiens we always guide them. They can pass to hospital section just with special plastic overshoeses, galoshes.

Because of our huge street animal population Turkey is a heaven for all kinds of infection diseases and in  PetCode we are fighting with hospital infections seriously. We are using hepafilters in all risky points, all our cages are made from chrome-nickel steel  for better disinfection, and they all have full glass doors to prevent the spread of infections via splashig, coughing, sneezing. We keep patients with infectious diseases in an isolated room. We are always  trying to obey high standart disinfection and sterilization rules everywhere in the hospital.

Oxygen is life and in PetCode we produce our own oxygen with a very special system and we safely use this oxygen in our anesthesia machine, intensive care units and everywhere in our hospitalization section.

Our hospitalization service has 4 sections.  We keep our patients with all kinds of infectious diseases in our infectious disease room. Our staff enter this room with special outwear. There is a special antibacterial plastic curtain in the entrance of this room which keep the infections inside and we are using special hepafilters  for the ventilation  so that possible infections are not entering to the general ventilation system  of the hospital. When we have patients that we are not sure about their health and vaccination status we keep them in cages in our  quarantinedepartment until we feel sure that they do not carry any kind of infectious disease to our other visitors. In our regular hospitalization section we have 2 parts and of course one is for dogs and the other one is for cats. All these parts are openning to a central examination room and we carry our patients here for their regular applications.

In PetCode we are able to perform almost all kind of surgeries. We are doing a lot of brain and spinal surgeries,total hip replacements,  tuberositas tibia advancements, tuberositas tibia transpozitions, eksteranl fixators, vertebral stabilisations, ventriculoperitoneal and syringosubarachnoid shunts,  different types of reconstructive and oncological surgeries, and eye surgeries including phacoemulsifications. All these advanced surgical procedures  give us a big responsibility as well.

. If you are planning to perform that sort of sophisticated and advanced surgical procedures , of course just good surgical skills are not enough for these plans. You need experience, a good team, perfect medical equipment and a very sterile surgical room.

That is why Petcode  brought  “Full sterile operation room term”  to Turkey.  We enter to our operation room through a half sterile room always with head caps and masks. Floor surface of our operation room is made from esd conductive, antistatic and antibacterial material. Our walls are covered with chrome- nickel steel  because bacterial contamination of this material is  diffucult and disinfection is always easy. Ventilation of this room is special because air is entering to the room through hepafilters and a system always aspirates the dirty air inside the room again through hepafilters so there is always positive pressure inside the room and air entrance is limited even we are openning our doors during enterance. Our surgical room is also full of state of art medical equipments that allow us to perform all kind of surgeries.

Petcode is the one and only private animal hospital that has  its own computered tomography machine in Turkey. With the help of our  three dimentional reconstruction programmes we use,  we are able to obtain very high qualified images almost compatible with high field  magnetic resonans images so we can diagnose several  neurological and oncological problems easily.

As you can see, PetCode Animal Hospital is the biggest investment done for small animal practice in Turkey  but we are still dreaming about a perfect animal hospital with our  lives coded to animal love,and veterinary medicine.