The Amber Vet Group, Singapore

Organisational background

The Amber Vet group is located in Sunny Singapore. We are a single-location, two-practice small-group boutique veterinary centre.

Amber Vet was founded in 2011 as a small animal practice by our principal Veterinarian Dr Brian Loon and Practice Manager Gabriel Wong, who continue actively managing the practice on the ground.

In 2017, Amber Cat Vet was established just adjacent and connected to Amber Vet. As Singapore's first ISFM Gold Cat-Friendly Clinic, Amber Cat Vet provides a stress-free experience for our cat patients and clients while ensuring one seamless and coordinated work environment for our team members.

Organisation aims & mission

The Amber Vet team thrives on providing the best care possible to our patients, clients and team members alike.

Patient best care:

We are thoroughly equipped with diagnostic and treatment services to allow our vets to thoroughly investigate our patients' ailments, and follow through with the best standards of care.

Our facilities include:

• Digital radiography with fluoroscopy.
• Ultrasonography: including abdominal and echocardiography.
• Flexible and rigid endoscopy: including canine and feline rhinoscopy, otoscopy, cystoscopy and GI laparoscopy.
• Digital dental radiography (we advocate full dental COHATs with dental x-rays for all our dental procedures).
• iM3 GS Deluxe dental machine and dental scaler.
• iM3 Vet-Tome for teeth extractions: No more manual labour with manual extraction instruments!
• Endodontics, including root canal treatment.
• Tonopen.
• Full suite of in-house IDEXX diagnostics: Catalyst DX (biochem), Procyte (CBC), Coag (PT/aPTT), urine dipstick reader, urine Sedivue (sediment analysis reader), SNAP Dx.
• Microscopes, centrifuge.
• Acupuncture (by IVAS-certified principal veterinarian).

We provide VIN (Veterinary Information Network) access to our veterinarians.

Visiting UK-based feline specialist Dr Elise Robertson comes to our centre quarterly to see specialist consults and perform endoscopy procedures, and is available year-round for teleconsultations.

We also regularly send samples out to veterinary reference laboratories as required and we work closely with the pathologists.

Team best care:

We strive to avoid overtime for our team as much as possible.

• We accept last appointments only 30 minutes before closing time: most of our consults are by appointment.
• We have recently terminated our after-hours service to allow team members to rest well and have uninterrupted personal time out of work hours. Our clients contact other 24 hours emergency centres for after-hours care. Most of our clients still happily return to us for ongoing care thereafter.
• We allocate daily one-hour breaks for vets to have lunch and rest.
• Most of our appointments are allocated 30 minutes.
• We encourage our team members to take up regular CPD to enhance their knowledge and skills and hold in-house training sessions for the nursing team.
• We work hard to maintain team harmony and a positive work environment and encourage open communication amongst team members and with managers.

Client best care:

• Spacious waiting and consult rooms.
• Attending to client concerns promptly with a team effort, including direct client care liaison from our practice manager.
• Time is allocated for our vets to have admission and discharge consults with the attending vet for procedures.
• We practise a consultative process with clients; informing them about their pets' conditions and recommended options, allowing pet owners to make decisions they are most comfortable with, in line with ethical and professional guidelines.

• We value a harmonious team environment. We make time for lunches together, and arrange social gatherings whenever possible.
• We value providing a high quality of veterinary care and clients who appreciate our dedication, as evident from the positive client reviews on our website and social media platforms.
• We value open communication amongst the team, and the managers constantly listen to team members' feedback and suggestions, implementing positive changes whenever we can to improve work processes and work-life harmony. This is seen from the recent cessation of our after-hours services, as well as well developed protocols over the years to streamline our services and efficiency (e.g. an online system for clients to request for counter sale items and batching the requests for our veterinarians to approve once a day instead of scattered throughout the day).
• We value utilising technology to our advantage and allowing our work processes to be as efficient and easy as possible, e.g. utilising various functions on our Ezyvet practice management software for internal communications, subscribing to additional functions like Vet Radar to digitalise anaesthesia monitoring and hospitalisation workflow management, and investing in the IDEXX SediVue machine to read urine sedimentation for greater accuracy and reduced manual work required.

We care equally for our team, patients and clients (see above).

We emphasize providing quality in-depth care over the quantity of cases. The management constantly makes changes to enhance staff welfare and work-life balance.

We encourage veterinarians to pursue their areas of interest, and our principal veterinarian is keen to teach and share his knowledge which he has acquired over the past 15 years, including in the areas of ultrasonography, endoscopy, dentistry and acupuncture.

While our clientele is mostly very lovely and kind, we are also protective of our staff and will not tolerate any abusive behaviour from our clients. We terminate services of clients who are abusive or with whom we cannot have a collaborative and respectful relationship.

The ideal Amber Vet veterinarian is one who:

• has strong foundations in general practice, practising gold-standard medicine as much as possible, while being sensitive to the client's requirements and preferences.
• is able to effectively communicate with clients with empathy.
• has strong work ethics and works well as a team but can also be independent when required - keeps up-to-date with latest evidence-based medicine.
• maintains thorough medical records to allow colleagues to follow up on cases in their absence, allowing undisturbed rest on days off.