Animal Friends Renewal Shocker

sheramber

I once phoned my vet out of hours and s he gave me advice over the phone and said it did sound like it could wait until morning. No problem.

However, the vet answering the call may not be in the surgery or have your pet's records available. When on call they can be out on a call or at home ( or even in bed asleep if it is at night) or , as one of our vets is somettimes, at agility club.

Fred.Hedgehog

Ah no, didn't see this... Would've been most interesting!! Wonder if it was a similar hike to ours?

sheramber

Fred.Hedgehog wrote: »

Ah no, didn't see this... Would've been most interesting!! Wonder if it was a similar hike to ours?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b06jhjxd/watchdog-series-36-episode-2

around 45 minutes in for premium hike.

Two other cases limited pay outs beforehand.

Fred.Hedgehog

Wow! That hike beats ours doesn't it! :eek::eek:
I'm curious how a lifetime cover can have exclusions though, shame the report didn't go into more detail.
I'll share this link with another poster who is suffering the "life threatening" emergency clause at the mo

gettingready

Well, life cover should only have exclusions on issues that happened BEFORE cover was taken or things related to those.

AF seem to be adding exclusions for issues that happened while a pet is covered with them already, they exclude those following year. This is just very VERY bad...

pinkteapot

UKTigerlily wrote: »

Can someone please explain Vetphone to me? I know what it is, I just don't understand why use it when you can call your own vets 24/7, who have the pets medical info on screen and can advise based on that not just symptoms? I called my vet one Sunday and was told no need to come in, so they don't automatically say you have to

Depends on your vet. Ours is only open 8am-6pm Mon-Fri and Saturday mornings. Outside of that, we have Vets Now covering the whole town but they're not great at over-the-phone advice (probably because they want you to come in for a £170 consultation fee!).

When our vet is open, phone advice is hit and miss. You can't always get advice then and there (depends who's available or if all the vets are in appointments), so sometimes you have to wait for a call-back.

We've used Vetphone for (1) general advice - eg diet advice when kitty started putting on weight and (2) to ask if we needed to go to the vet when kitty had some minor, mild symptoms.

We used it maybe five times in our first year with kitty. I think it's a useful service for first-time owners who may be worried about every tiny symptom. We'll probably use it less in the future as we know more about cat health and what does/doesn't need vet attention now.

If we didn't have insurance that came with Vetphone, we'd have called our vet more. As we have the advice line, we use it.

sheramber

I think the Vetphone is also more for them than us, to confirm that an out of hours visit is appropriate.

Some companies are now querying OOH charges.

If the vetphone advises an OOH vet visit then they can't argue that it wasn't needed.