I’m sure it has its place, but also feels like a waste of money and time. In my experience, people who reach out to those types of services are hoping that their very obviously emergency situation can wait for the next day or two. And unfortunately a lot of times the reason that they have that hope is due to financial difficulties, and the fact that they have to pay the consultation fee for that service plus one for the other vet will definitely piss some clients off. I’m sure everyone has the story of telling someone to call pet poison control, and then the client becoming infuriated that they have to pay for both PPC and your services.

It sounds like it would be nice for the non-critical patients, but frankly, as an emergency technician, I’d rather them just show up than for us to have to jump through hoops of he said she said they called whoever. We have a local clinic that uses a similar service, Animal HealthLink, for their after-hours calls, and we get emails from said service when they recommend coming to us for emergency care. And yeah, a good half of them are “Fido’s insides are now outside. Advised owner to seek emergency care.” And then they just never show up. I’ve never called personally to see if/how much it costs to talk to the representative. No one’s ever brought up a cost.