St. Marks Veterinary Hospital 24 Hour Pager Service
At St. Marks Vet, we know that emergencies don't always happen during business hours. We therefore have a pager system, which allows our clients to reach a doctor after the hospital has closed.
When you call 212-477-2688 between 8pm and 8am Monday to Friday, or 4pm to 9am Saturday and Sunday, you are connected to the answering service. Please leave your name, your phone number, your pet's name, what type of animal you have, and a brief description of the problem. For example Pls. call Joe Burns, 212-888-8888 re: cat Fluffy, just ate poison. It is much more helpful than Pls. call Burns, 888-8888 re: cat. It will thereby insure that your call is returned as quickly as possible.
When you talk to the answering service, you need to tell them that the problem is an emergency and you want the doctor paged to return your call. Alternatively, if Fluffy instead had a slight limp but was otherwise fine, you can request a call back the next day during business hours. This page will not interrupt the doctor on call, but will be printed out in the morning for a staff member to phone you. If you are unsure if your pet needs to be seen as an emergency visit and would like a doctor to call you back, request an emergency page.
Sometimes a page will not go through, or the service will incorrectly code an emergency call as a non-emergency page. We are usually able to return your call within 20-30 minutes. If you have not received a call back within one-half hour, please try again. We cannot return a phone call we never knew about. Additionally, we cannot return phone calls to numbers that are blocked. We are usually returning calls from homes, restaurants, cell phones, etc. and do not give out our private numbers. You must unblock your phone in order to receive a return call. If you are waiting for a doctor to call you back and do not have call waiting, please stay off the phone and wait for the return call. It can be very frustrating to be paged on emergency and then get busy signals with repeated attempts. Please also remember that the doctor returning your call has no access to your pets' records and so you need to provide all pertinent historical information.
Lastly, please use common sense when paging. The service is set up so that we can help with medical or surgical emergencies, not for basic pet care questions that can be answered at any time. We are open 12 hours a day during the week and from 9-4 on the weekends. Many times we can assist you better during the week when your pets' chart can be pulled and the history is in front of us. You may also be able to speak to a specific doctor. When you call on emergency, the only doctor available to you is the one on call that night. All of our veterinarians are very qualified to help you. We try to provide this valuable service to our clients while still respecting the private time of individual staff members. We hope that you will never need to put through an emergency page, but if you do, we're here to help.
Thank you.
