Patients at the Ontario Veterinary College (OVC) Health Sciences Centre’s (HSC’s) Companion Animal Hospital can now benefit from improved specialty care, thanks to recent multi-million-dollar upgrades to its intensive care unit (ICU).

An $8.36-million fundraising campaign, launched in 2020 by OVC Pet Trust, has allowed for renovations that have doubled size of the unit, along with the addition of specialty suites for ophthalmology and neurology services. Indeed, the ICU, which was first opened in the 1980s as a first-of-its-kind facility in Canada, now occupies about 372 m² (4,000 sf) within OVC.

More than 18,000 companion animal patients visited the HSC between 2021 and 2022. Further, each year, about 2,500 pets require complex, critical, or specialty care in its ICU.

“OVC is a tertiary referral hospital that offers advanced medical services that are essential to our community and are not available elsewhere in Canada or around the world,” says the college’s dean, Jeff Wichtel, BVSc, PhD, ACT. “Our veterinary teams are the guardians of our most critical patients.”

In addition to housing these patients, the facility provides hands-on training for future veterinarians and veterinary specialists, Dr. Wichtel explains.

“Improvements to OVC’s critical care and specialty services units enable our team to focus on delivering best-in-class care for our patients with complex, evolving needs—all while educating, training, and inspiring the next generation of veterinary professionals,” he says.

The upgrades will also benefit the college’s clinical researchers working in diverse fields of medicine, including cardiology, neurology, oncology, internal medicine, and surgery.

About half of the funding for the expansion came from the late Dr. Catherine Bergeron, a long-time OVC Pet Trust supporter and namesake of the Catherine Bergeron Centre for Urgent and Critical Care within the newly renovated space.

The renovation project also established the Dana-Zara Specialty Services Suite, named by donors Llewellyn and Susan Smith, as well as the Dalwood Ophthalmology Suite, named by donors Donna Ross and Peter Szmidt.

Written with files from OVC.