Our free clinics are back!

By Kaytie Grant

On Saturday the 27th of June we held our first post-lockdown clinic at our centre in Concepcion, Tarlac. Whilst normally the majority of our clinics are mobile, due to the post-COVID-19 lockdown restrictions we’ve been forced to hold our clinics from the centre and initially ask for events to be appointment only.

It has been a difficult few months for everyone during the pandemic and it has meant we had to put all of our clinics on hold. Our free spay and neuter clinics are one of the most important aspects of our work and so we were really keen to start them up as soon as we safely could. Now that lockdown is easing in the Philippines, we have decided to hold two clinics a week at the centre. On Saturdays, we will conduct Spay and Neuter clinics and on Tuesdays, we will hold Vaccination and Mange clinics.

Due to the new regulations, we made sure to take the temperature of anyone who came to the clinic upon arrival, including our team at the beginning of the day. We also asked that each owner bring only one pet to the appointment. As you can see in the picture below, we have also provided our team with visors and installed a Perspex screen for registration. This was all in addition to regular hand sanitising, usage of masks and strict 1-metre social distancing at all times.

One of the other lockdown restrictions we face is that we are only able to have one vet operating at a time, so this restricts the number of surgeries we’re able to do in a day. For our first clinic, we spayed/neutered 7 dogs that morning and it felt great to be able to help again. Spaying and neutering are so vital to control dog populations and to stop the spread of diseases such as rabies.

Whilst we were at the clinic we also caught up with some of our centre residents such as Kilay and Skinless who you may remember we decided to adopt a few years ago! The dogs are all doing really well and have been amazingly cared for through lockdown by our Kennel Mate Mark pictured below with Kilay!

Whilst we are hopeful this situation is short-term, the team have adapted really well to our ‘new normal’ and they are delighted to back where they belong helping the dogs, that otherwise might not be helped. We are so proud to be able to offer all of these services for free so that no people or animals are excluded. Thank you for your kind support which makes all of this work possible!

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