We are accredited under the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons Practice Standards Scheme at Small Animal General Practice level, with Farm and Equine modules, and we hold Outstanding awards in Client Service and Team & Professional Responsibility. That means an assessor visits, unannounced in part, and works through several hundred requirements covering everything from anaesthetic monitoring and controlled-drug storage to how we handle a complaint and whether our nurses are given the time to do what they are trained for. The certificate is on the waiting-room wall next to the fee list, and the full report is available to any client who asks — it is not a document we have ever felt the need to keep quiet about.

All four vets are registered with the RCVS and you can check any of us on the public register in about thirty seconds, which we would encourage. Miriam Halloway qualified at Liverpool in 1998; Theo Nkemelu at Bristol in 2007 and holds the Advanced Practitioner qualification in Small Animal Surgery; Rosa Pemberton at the Royal Veterinary College in 2011. Bea Sandford is a Registered Veterinary Nurse — a protected title requiring three years of training and annual continuing professional development, which is worth saying because "veterinary nurse" is still used loosely by some employers and should not be. Every one of us records more CPD hours annually than the minimum, and the practice pays for all of it in work time.

Sometimes it does. An animal reacts badly, a diagnosis takes longer than it should have, somebody is spoken to briskly on a bad day. Tell us — ask for Miriam, who will ring you back the same day and who will not delegate it. You will get an explanation of what happened rather than a form, and where we were at fault you will be told so plainly and not charged for putting it right. If you are still unhappy you may take it to the RCVS, and we will give you their details ourselves rather than making you look them up. In a hundred and fifteen years this practice has been the subject of two formal complaints, both upheld in part, and we keep the correspondence.

We will not recommend a treatment because it is profitable, and no vet here has a sales target of any kind. We will not sell a health plan to somebody who would be better served by insurance. We will not perform anaesthetic-free dentistry, ear cropping, tail docking outside the narrow legal exemptions, or declawing under any circumstances. We will not put an animal through a fourth round of something that is not working because the owner cannot bear to stop — we will tell you, gently and more than once, when we think the kindest medicine is to stop. And we will not tell you an animal can be saved when it cannot, however much both of us would like that to be true.

Veterinary practices hold controlled drugs — the same schedules a pharmacy holds — and the record-keeping around them is exacting, for good reason. Ours live in a bolted cabinet, logged in a bound register in ink with two signatures against every entry, reconciled weekly and audited at every Practice Standards inspection. The register sits out in the dispensary rather than in a drawer. None of this is remarkable and all of it is worth stating, because a practice that is casual about that cabinet is very likely casual about a great many other things, and it is one of the few indicators a client could actually check for themselves if it occurred to them to ask.