We had an awful experience with Ashcroft when our 18 month old Labrador cross dog died 8 days after…read moreher spay. We are pragmatic people and we understand that sometimes animals die unpredictability, so we don't leave this review lightly. We knew our dog was very unwell and getting worse during the 8 days following the operation and we took her back to Ashcroft 3 times during this period and phoned them multiple times too. On the morning of the day she died we were so worried about her and the perceived lack of interest in her from Ashcroft that we arranged our own referral to a specialist, but they needed Ashcroft to assess her for the referral. We told Ashcroft we were worried for the survival of our dog and asked Ashcroft for an emergency appointment. Ashcroft assessed her as not an emergency, so her appointment was pushed to the next day. She died overnight that same night. We put a complaint in to Ashcroft about how they had treated us when we tried to raise our concerns about our dog. Our complaint was not about the fact that she had died, it was about how we felt efforts made to save her life were poor and we felt we had not been listened to when we knew she was very ill. Ashcroft quickly engaged a third party Defence Service and refused to answer any of our questions about our dog's death. What was even more devastating was that without even addressing the issue we raised which was regarding how we were treated during her illness, the majority of their response to us inferred that we had allowed our dog to eat poison, or even worse been fed something poisonous by us. This was truly an awful thing to do to a pet owner. I can assure you that we absolutely did not let our dog eat poison and in fact there were other possible explanations for her death, but Ashcroft and their Defence Service refused to speak to us about any of it and did not even look at her clinical history from her previous vets. We had no idea how to get the answers we wanted so we hired an Independent Expert Vet to review our case and he gave us our answers. He also independently looked at our complaint and found that there were multiple occasions where the veterinary practice and our recollection of events and conversations differed, and unless there is audio or video recording present in the consulting areas or of the telephone conversations then our complaints could not be investigated further. This is despite both my husband and I being present at the vet appointments and having the same recollection of events and conversations. The Independent Expert Vet also stated that it was clear from the many appointments and phone calls that we were very concerned about our dog, and that he believed it is likely that many veterinary surgeons would have clearly advised taking blood samples or admitted our dog for supportive care during the appointments leading up to her death. We have no way of knowing whether her life could have been saved had that happened. However, the bar for professional negligence had not been reached. We then asked the RCVS's impartial mediation service the VCMS for help to conclude our complaint, but Ashcroft immediately refused to engage in the mediation. If you use this vets I would recommend you record all appointments using a voice recorder because without this you have no way to prove what was said to you during your appointments and phone calls without recordings. Ashcroft are not a local independent business they are owned by a large company called Independent Vetcare Ltd who own 100s of vet practices in the UK https://ivcevidensia.co.uk/