Where do you take your pet when they aren’t feeling well? Between your primary care veterinarian, urgent care, and the emergency room, how do you know which service to choose?

Urgent care veterinary clinics are filling an important need when pet owners find themselves needing care outside of their primary care veterinarian’s hours. Until relatively recently, emergency care was the only option.

Urgent care wasn’t introduced as a concept in human medicine until the 1970s, and it’s an even newer concept in veterinary medicine that’s gained popularity in the last five years.

The first dedicated urgent care veterinary clinic in the United States opened in North Carolina just 10 years ago. The University of Minnesota (UMN) opened its Urgent Care Service in the Lewis Small Animal Hospital in 2015. Urgent care services were developed as a quicker and more cost-efficient option when a pet isn’t able to get in with their primary care veterinary team.

“Urgent care is a really new part of veterinary care and it’s something pet owners are still learning more about,” says Kendra Dauenhauer, an associate professor and veterinarian in urgent care at the Veterinary Medical Center (VMC).

Dauenhauer helps pet owners navigate which care option is the best fit for different injuries or illnesses. It’s important to understand when to seek out an emergency room and when urgent care is maybe a better option, but Dauenhauer says the best piece of advice she can give is for pet owners to call their primary care veterinarian for guidance before making any moves.

“If they are not open, that’s when you can reach out to urgent and emergency care vets,” she says. “We are always happy to talk through things and help figure out where the best place to go is.”

Primary Care

Primary care (PC) includes wellness care such as regular checkups, vaccines, care for chronic or long-term health issues, or minor problems that can be scheduled in advance. This can be mild lethargy, mild nasal discharge, or an occasional cough. Primary care doctors can help with intermittent symptoms of any type that come and go.

“This is what you think of as your regular vet, where you take your dog or cat to for their regular appointments,” Dauenhauer says.

These clinics are typically open during business hours, but are sometimes available on weekends or later into the evening. Getting care is also typically cheaper at a primary care practice compared to an urgent or emergency care setting. However, these appointments typically have to be booked in advance—often weeks or months for routine exams—and schedules are often full, meaning primary care veterinary teams can’t always see patients when health issues unexpectedly show up.

Advantages: Primary care vets know your pet and are able to get a sense of the overall lifetime trends that your pet might be experiencing. They also can more easily schedule a follow-up visit.

Disadvantages: Primary care clinics have limited appointment space and may not be able to perform advanced care or hospitalization. “Even if they want to, they aren’t always able to see all of their patients that need to see them because there are so many patients already on their books,” Dauenhauer says.

Emergency Care

Emergency care clinics, or emergency rooms, are typically open 24/7 or after primary clinics are closed. They see pets with life-threatening injuries or illnesses, and appointments can either be made by calling ahead of your arrival or by walking in.

Emergency care facilities are the only places equipped to care for severe injuries or illnesses that require emergency surgery—such as a C-section or removing something your pet accidentally swallowed—or hospitalization, such as severe dehydration.

Emergency room waits can be long, Dauenhauer says, since patients are evaluated when they come in and are seen based on the severity of their medical issue, a process called triaging.

Advantages: “It’s there when it’s needed, and it can be a life-saving sort of situation, and that is the big advantage,” Dauenhauer says.

Disadvantages: It can be a very long wait, often more than four hours, due to the busy nature of emergency rooms and the number of pets that need care. Emergency care is typically more expensive than primary or urgent care, and, compared to a primary vet, emergency care teams have limited access to a pet’s medical records.

Urgent Care

Urgent care can treat your pet for non-life-threatening injuries or illnesses that happen suddenly, such as a urinary tract infection (UTI), limping, or something stuck in your pet’s paw. Appointments can be scheduled the same day, or pet owners can call ahead or walk in to be seen. Like emergency care facilities, urgent care facilities are typically open on weekends and evenings, when primary care clinics are not, but some urgent care services are also open during the day. Urgent care can do most of the same diagnostics that primary care clinics can do, including general blood work, testing for Lyme disease, and taking X-rays. Urgent care can prescribe antibiotics if the issue is an infection or administer IV fluids. Some can set fractured bones.

Urgent cares also triage pets to determine who needs to be seen first, but the process plays another important role in these settings.

“In these cases, the vet is making sure this pet can be seen at an urgent care and that they don’t need to go to an emergency room to get proper care,” Dauenhauer says.

Advantages: Urgent care typically costs less and has shorter wait times than emergency rooms, usually less than two hours. It is open when primary care clinics are not.

Disadvantages: Urgent care typically costs more than primary care, and the team has limited access to an animal’s medical history.

How to determine if your pet needs emergency or urgent care

There are a few medical issues that Dauenhauer says should prompt pet owners to go to the emergency room: severe or uncontrolled bleeding, loss of consciousness, trouble standing or walking, trouble breathing, a suddenly swollen abdomen, a pet that can’t keep food or water down, severe lethargy, or trauma. If a cat is panting, if a pet’s gums are blue or white, if a pet is in labor but cannot give birth, or if you know your pet has swallowed a foreign object.

“You know your pet best, so if you think there is something strange going on with your pet, there probably is. Once you make that call, it’s our job to help you determine what care your pet needs and where they should go,” Dauenhauer says.

The VMC’s website has a list of phone numbers for urgent care and emergency care providers throughout the state. Listen to Dauenhauer’s presentation on primary, urgent, and emergency care here.