The practice started by servicing the farming community in the area around Totnes in the 1950’s. Derek Hair and Wilf Beaumont began their successful partnership with a practice in Castle Street, Totnes. The small animal work played a small part initially with operations taking place on Thursday evenings after the consults had finished. Michael Webster and Jim Goodwin joined the partnership as it expanded to five branches around South Devon. During the 1980’s the veterinary profession started to take small animal work seriously. In recent years we have seen rapid growth in all of our six practices and we have increased our vet numbers from six to fifteen.
A name change followed, and we became Dart Vale Veterinary Group.
2012 saw the opening of our new purpose built surgery in Totnes, including a large clinical care area with operating rooms, separate kennel rooms for cats and dogs, and even walk-in kennels for the bigger customers. The building houses our main offices, our control centre for our roving vets and a larger waiting room. Our Totnes site offers 24-hour nursing care for our inpatients.
2012 also saw the completion of computerisation of our patient records and data base. Our staff spent many hours adding the card records to our computer database. Now, wherever your pet is treated across our group, the vet can see all the notes from the other surgeries.
Bringing the story up to date, our last significant change was separating our farm and equine from the companion animals in January 2017. This was done for the benefit of all our clients and patients as we are now able to offer a more focused clinical service with greater continuity of veterinary surgeons. This is particularly noticeable in our Totnes surgery where we are in the final phase of seeking accreditation as an RCVS Veterinary Hospital.
As a trusted and respected local veterinary practice we provide veterinary care for several local animal charities. We support these charities by offering discounted rates to them as we believe these charities provide a valuable local service rehoming hundreds of unwanted and neglected animals every year.
