Blogs · July 2026

How should a vet practice handle out-of-hours calls?

You already have to arrange 24-hour emergency cover. The question is what happens to the other calls, the ones that are not emergencies at all.

The short answer: out-of-hours calls fall into two groups, and they need different handling. A genuine emergency must reach a person immediately, and you are already required to provide or arrange that. Everything else is an owner asking your opening hours, your consult fee, whether you have anything on Saturday, or whether they can move Thursday. Those calls should be answered, not sent to voicemail. The mistake is treating every call after six as either an emergency or a nuisance.

Start with the obligation

Under the RCVS Code of Professional Conduct, vets in practice must provide or arrange 24-hour emergency first aid and pain relief. That is not optional and no technology changes it. Whatever you put on the line out of hours, its first job is to get a genuine emergency to a person, fast.

So the real design question is: what happens to everything else?

The calls that are not emergencies but still need an answer

Most evening and weekend calls are information and booking calls. Owners ring after work, because that is when they are home and worrying about the booster that is overdue or the lump they noticed on Sunday.

They ring because they cannot find the answer anywhere else. The Competition and Markets Authority found fewer than 40% of practices publish prices on their websites, and fewer than half of owners received pricing information ahead of non-routine treatment. So the phone is the only route, and your phone is off.

That has a cost you never see. 51% of owners considered only one practice when choosing a vet. They ring once. If they get voicemail, they do not leave a message and try again on Monday. They ring the practice down the road, or they do not book at all.

The three ways practices cover it now

Voicemail. Cheap, and it quietly loses you the owners who would have booked. A message nobody returns until Tuesday is not cover.

An answering service. A human picks up. They cannot see your diary, do not know your fees, and cannot book. They take a message, and your Monday morning starts with a callback list. For genuine emergencies, they route, which is exactly what you need. For everything else, they defer the work.

An AI agent. It answers every call, in your practice's voice, and it can actually resolve the non-clinical ones: it knows your fees, your hours, your services, and it books into your real diary at 10pm on a Sunday. Emergencies route straight to a human, immediately.

The point of the third is not that it is clever. It is that a booked consult on Sunday night is worth considerably more than a voicemail on Monday.

What a workable overnight setup has to do

  1. Emergencies reach a human, fast. Configured by you, tested by you, and never handled by an agent trying to be helpful.
  2. Non-clinical calls get answered, not deferred. Fees, hours, bookings, repeat appointments.
  3. Bookings land in your real diary, so Monday morning starts with patients, not a callback list.
  4. You can read back everything that was said overnight.
  5. Nothing clinical is ever attempted. No judging how urgent a case is, no advice on symptoms, no medication guidance.

What HealthCentre does overnight

It answers calls, emails, chats and messages, in your practice's voice, all night and all weekend. It books consults into your system. It handles repeat bookings and reminders. It clears the inbox so your team does not walk into it.

And it never gives clinical advice. Anything clinical or urgent goes straight to a person on your team, by the rules you set. That does not change at 3am.

Frequently asked questions

Can an AI agent replace our out-of-hours emergency provider?

No. You must still provide or arrange 24-hour emergency first aid and pain relief. The agent routes emergencies to that human route quickly. It does not replace it.

What about owners who just want to know your prices at 9pm?

That is exactly what it is for. It answers from your published fees and books them in if they want an appointment.

Will it wake up a vet unnecessarily?

You set the escalation rules: what counts as urgent, who it reaches, and how. It follows them and logs what it did.

Do owners mind talking to an AI at night?

They mind voicemail considerably more. What matters to them is that someone picked up and sorted them out.

Sources

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