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Our wellness team at ASAP Cats is responsible for a number of important in-house surgeries and procedures to keep our cats happy and healthy. As a result, there are a few critical upgrades that we are looking to make in order to maximize safety and comfort for each kitty during their treatment. Take a look at some of the equipment we’d like to add to our arsenal:
When an animal undergoes anesthesia, it is not uncommon for their body temperature to decrease (this happens in people, too!) In order to prevent hypothermia for animals undergoing lengthy anesthetic procedures, such as dentistry, it’s recommended that they be provided with heat support.
While normally one would think to use a heating pad to provide heat support, heating pads can easily lead to thermal burns when used on animals under anesthesia and are therefore not recommended. Instead, the preferred method of warming the patient is via a heating device that circulates either warm air or water within a blanket around the patient, such as a Bair Hugger.
Having a Bair hugger would greatly enhance the comfort and safety for our anesthetic patients having lengthy procedures.
Estimated cost: $2,500
Microhematocrit centrifuges spin blood samples to separate the different components, used primarily for laboratory testing. While ASAP does have a centrifuge with the capacity for the large blood tubes that we often send out to a lab for testing, we are looking to purchase a microhematocrit (tiny glass tube) centrifuge.
Having one of these centrifuges would allow us to do some in-house pre-anesthetic blood sampling for cats on the day of their surgery. This would allow us to make sure they are not anemic and there have been no significant changes from previous lab samples that would make it unsafe for them to undergo anesthesia.
Estimated cost: $1,600
An IV pump is a machine that is used to provide a specific amount of IV fluids over a specific time period. Because cats are so small, they have a small amount of fluids that their systems can tolerate at any given time.
An IV pump delivers a margin of safety, ensuring that the intravenous fluids are not flowing too quickly or too slowly into the patient. As ASAP moves into providing more complicated surgeries at our own facility, we need to make sure we are able to provide the support to make those surgeries as safe as possible for our patients, so equipment like IV pumps would make all the difference.
Estimated cost: $1,000