Expert Soft Tissue Surgery for Your Pet’s Health and Wellbeing

We have the equipment, experience and expertise to offer both routine and more complex soft tissue surgeries, with care and compassion.

We understand the safety and wellbeing of your beloved pet is paramount and that it can be stressful when they need surgical treatment. Our team has extensive Veterinary surgical experience and our professional and caring staff will ensure you pet’s surgical journey is as smooth as possible.

Wingham & Valley Vets offer a comprehensive surgical service, with care and advice given both pre and post surgery, including complimentary post-operative checks to ensure your pet’s recovery is as rapid and smooth as possible. We will take the time to answer any questions you have, and to ensure you are as fully informed as possible about your pet’s treatment.

We provide a 24 hour Emergency Service. We are there for you and your pet, both in hours and in the event of an emergency. With piped oxygen to every treatment table, state-of-the-art monitoring equipment and purpose-built ICU runs with camera monitoring, your pet is in the safest hands.

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Here is what to expect when you bring your pet to Wingham & Valley Vets for a surgical procedure:

Two Fully Equipped Purpose-Built Surgical Theatres:

Advanced anaesthetic monitoring and patient warming systems for faster recovery and a surgery theatre built to Hospital of Excellence standards, ensuring surgical sterility and patient safety.

Dedicated Theatre Nurse:

An experienced and highly trained nurse provides personalised anaesthetic care tailored to your pet’s needs, under the guidance of the Veterinary Surgeon, ensuring their safety and well-being throughout their procedure.

Spacious ICU Recovery Runs:

Large, comfortable enclosures with glass doors for full visibility and monitoring reduce anxiety and promote smoother recoveries. Our ICU runs have cameras to enable continuous monitoring during the recovery period.

Dedicated Recovery Nurse:

Our dedicated recovery nurses remain with your pet as they recover from anaesthesia, performing post-surgical monitoring for pain management and to ensure their safety and comfort.

Commitment to Continuing Professional Development:

Our Veterinarians & Nurses never stop learning and regularly attend conferences, workshops and courses to ensure their patients are receiving the most up to date and advanced care.

Progressive and Comprehensive Pain Management:

There have been significant advancements in pain management in Veterinary Medicine. Since animals feel pain in the same way humans do, but are unable to verbalise their discomfort, it is essential to be proactive and thorough with controlling post-surgical pain in Veterinary patients. Each surgical patient at Wingham & Valley Vets receives a tailored pain management protocol, commencing with their preoperative sedative and where necessary, including nerve blocks (ultrasound guided where necessary), continuous opioid infusions and postoperative multimodal pain relief. Pain scoring throughout their hospital stay ensures your pet is pain free and relaxed.

Our Procedures

Skin & Eye Corrective Surgery

We perform a myriad of corrective skin and eye surgeries, including entropion, skin fold pyoderma, vulval fold pyoderma, cherry eye surgeries and temporary tarsorrhaphy to treat corneal ulcers.

With these surgeries experience is important, to ensure there is a good cosmetic and functional result. We also have extensive experience and capability in wound management, including the use of skin flaps and reconstructive surgery.

Lump Removals

Lump removal surgery is one of the most common surgeries we perform and we can provide professional and educated advice on the best course of action to diagnose and treat your pet’s worrisome lump.

We offer comprehensive, caring and professional advice, to maximise the chances of identifying cancerous lumps, and thence achieving a surgical cure. The best chance of curing a cancerous lump surgically is with the first surgical removal, which should aim, where indicated, to achieve wide margins to minimise the chances of regrowth. It is much more difficult to remove all microscopic cancer cells in second and subsequent surgeries if the initial removal is unsuccessful.

An experienced surgeon and appropriate preoperative planning and diagnostics such as biopsy or needle aspirate are therefore paramount. Where a surgical cure is not possible, or adjunctive chemotherapy is required, we can help. You can read more about our oncology services here.

Prophylactic Gastropexy

A gastropexy is a surgical procedure that can be performed in large breed dogs to prevent gastric dilation and volvulus (GDV), also known as bloat.

The goal of a gastropexy is to create a permanent adhesion between the gastric wall and the abdominal wall to prevent the dilated stomach from twisting on itself. GDV is a life-threatening condition that is most observed in deep-chested, large breed dogs. Common breeds affected include Great Danes, German Shepherds, Standard Poodles, Irish Setters and Weimaraners.

The lifetime risk of some of these breeds developing a GDV is 24% and 21% respectively. A GDV is rapidly fatal and not all dogs will survive, even with intensive care and emergency surgery. It is therefore strongly recommended to prevent the condition in predisposed breeds, by performing a prophylactic gastropexy, ideally at the time of desexing.

To discuss whether a gastropexy would be recommended in your dog, please contact us and we would be happy to advise you.

Desexing Procedures

We offer competitive prices for surgical desexing of all species including dogs, cats, rabbits, ferrets and guinea pigs, as well as farm animals such as cattle, horses, pigs, goats, alpacas and sheep.

Our Veterinarians are experienced, caring and focused on the safety, comfort and wellbeing of your beloved pet. You can read all about our professional and caring Desexing service here.

Airway Procedures (Brachycephalic Obstructive Airway Syndrome)

Brachycephalic Obstructive Airway Syndrome (BOAS) is a condition that affects breeds with a shortened face and nose such as bulldogs, pugs, French bulldogs and boxers. Breathing difficulties caused by this condition significantly compromise the welfare of the animal and require corrective surgery.

These patients will often display a number of the following symptoms:

- Snoring

- Exercise Intolerance

- Excessive Panting

- Noisy or laboured breathing

- Intolerance to heat

- Trouble sleeping (sleep apnoea)

- Digestive problems, such as regurgitation and/or vomiting.

These symptoms are due to five main problems in their airways which limit airflow and often require surgical correction:

- Stenotic nares: These are narrowed, often slit-like nostrils.

- Elongated soft palate: Because of their short noses, the ‘soft palate’ (roof of the back of the mouth) in brachycephalic breeds is often too long and can become trapped over the opening to the windpipe, causing problems breathing. To correct this, surgery is performed to shorten the soft palate.

- Thickened soft palate: In some cases, the soft palate also needs to be reduced in overall thickness, using dissection and a specialised surgical flap

- Everted laryngeal saccules: These are sacs that sit near the larynx in the throat and because of the increased breathing effort of brachycephalic breeds they will often turn inside out. In this case, they also need corrective surgery.

- Excessively large tonsils: When the tonsils are contributing to obstructed airflow, they are removed using a technique called tonsillectomy.

Our experienced surgeons can perform corrective surgery on all five of the above problems, as required, to gain the best long-term outcome for your much-loved pet.

We offer complimentary initial consultations for all BOAS patients.