Mental Health and Lockdown: Help Us to Help You

The team at Roundwood hope you are doing well. We wanted to drop an important note regarding mental health, and generally looking out for one another during lockdown.

As you are well aware, we are now in the third national lockdown, and it seems that restrictions are to last another few weeks - if not, months. ‘Lockdown fatigue’ has set in for most of us.

However, despite the restrictions, we at Roundwood are doing all that we possibly can to provide a service to you and your pets. We cannot wait until the day where we can welcome you back into the consultation room and carry out appointments as usual. But for now, this simply cannot be done. We are seeing more urgent cases than normal, which means that messages and emails may take us longer to get round to. Please bear with us, and rest assured that we are working tirelessly to help you within restrictions.

We politely ask you to respect our Covid policy and wear a mask in the surgery. Unfortunately some appointments, such as routine nail clipping, cannot go ahead at present. We have reduced appointments for the safety of our staff, who come to the clinic each and every day, risking contracting Covid-19. Please contact us in advance to book an appointment.

We understand that everyone is struggling with the restrictions and at times it is easy to forget the sacrifices others have made, including yourselves, to get through these unprecedented times. At the moment, our staff are experiencing less patience and understanding when we are unable to provide a service or agree to a personal request.

We have had to drastically change the way we practice, including wearing PPE (apron, gloves, face visor, mask) all day, which is not only uncomfortable, sometimes painful, but makes our jobs harder to do.

Some members of staff have children that they have had to send away to family in other areas of the country, not seeing them for weeks - and now months - at a time so that we can remain open and provide our essential service to you.

Our priority is to continue to be able to provide our essential services to you and protect our staff.

We would like to extend our thanks and appreciation to everyone who has shown compassion, understanding and patience during these difficult times.

We are doing the very best we can to provide a service for you and your pet. And we are incredibly grateful for your support and kindness - we appreciate deeply that this is hard for you too. Let’s stick together, support each other, and show understanding - we will get through this.

Stay safe out there,

The Roundwood Team