Jose Marroquin with Always Construction Services tapes up a window Thursday to get the frames ready for paint at the future location of Mosaic Animal Emergency and Specialty, which is set to open in August.
From left, veterinarians Julia Donnelly, Nicole Chamney and Sonja Sims, tour the future space of Mosaic Animal Emergency and Specialty, 24/7 pet hospital, on Thursday. The three local veterinarians are teaming up to open the hospital.
From left, veterinarians Nicole Chamney, Julia Donnelly and Sonja Sims in front of their future Mosaic Animal Emergency and Specialty, a 24/7 pet hospital, on Thursday, June 20, 2024. The three local veterinarians are teaming up to open the pet hospital.
Jose Marroquin with Always Construction Services tapes up a window Thursday to get the frames ready for paint at the future location of Mosaic Animal Emergency and Specialty, which is set to open in August.
The story goes something like this: All three veterinarians graduated about a decade ago from veterinary school at Colorado State University.
All three have worked in New Mexico for the past decade.
And, more notably, all three have had the itch to open a spot of their own with a focus on 24/7 emergency veterinary services.
The three vets — Julia Donnelly, Nicole Chamney and Sonja Sims — are one step closer to making that dream a reality as construction on their new pet hospital, Mosaic Animal Emergency and Specialty, is underway.
Mosaic, the three said, is slated to open in August in a 16,000-square-foot space at 2001 Vivigen Way near Interstate 25 and St. Francis Drive — which they hope is welcome news for a town and region that lack 24/7 emergency vet services.
“Veterinary medicine in New Mexico is kind of a small, tight-knit group of people — we all kind of know each other,” said Donnelly. “We’ve all seen a big need for there to be some emergency care in Northern New Mexico, and that topic comes up amongst veterinarians constantly. … We wanted to be able to provide the services for our community.”
From left, veterinarians Julia Donnelly, Nicole Chamney and Sonja Sims, tour the future space of Mosaic Animal Emergency and Specialty, 24/7 pet hospital, on Thursday. The three local veterinarians are teaming up to open the hospital.
The reemergence of a 24/7 emergency veterinary hospital comes four years after a similar spot closed at the same address that will now house Mosaic. The space was formerly occupied by Pathway Vet Alliance’s Veterinary Emergency & Specialty Center of Santa Fe, which closed down at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic.
For the group of veterinarians who will open Mosaic, the space made perfect sense — a building layout that is already designed for offering such services. That includes a group of operating rooms, exam rooms, isolation wards, a main treatment area with three stations and a patient kitchen with a focus on specialized diets.
But the owners are also installing specialized kennels, which they say can help them achieve a Fear Free certification, or “a really special designation that clinics can get if they put a lot of effort into making sure the experience of the animal is fear free,” Sims said.
“These kennels are part of that because each enclosure is somewhat soundproof,” she said. “It’s got its own heating source.”
If they get the certification, “we will be the first and only fear-free emergency or specialty hospital in New Mexico,” Donnelly said.
From left, veterinarians Nicole Chamney, Julia Donnelly and Sonja Sims in front of their future Mosaic Animal Emergency and Specialty, a 24/7 pet hospital, on Thursday, June 20, 2024. The three local veterinarians are teaming up to open the pet hospital.
For the group, the opening of Mosaic has come together rather quickly. The talks began last year. Donnelly said she was traveling and doing some out-of-state work at other emergency room pet hospitals when she realized she was traveling long and far to get her “emergency fix.”
“My discussions with them kind of led to, ‘Well, why are we having to travel out of state? Why can’t we bring these services here to our community where we all live [and where] we know we need them?’ ” Donnelly said.
Chamney said the hospital, once up and running, aims to bring specialty services as well, including cardiology and cancer care.
“We feel really strongly in the future we would love … to bring in specialists because specialty medicine in New Mexico is really sparse,” Chamney said. “But our idea is it’s really important to build a really strong 24-hour emergency and critical care facility … before getting those [specialists] into our building.”
In the short term, one specialty service the hospital will offer is telemedicine, “which is really nice because we can get some of that higher level of care to our patients by using the technology that is available to us now,” said Donnelly.
“I think just being able to kind of run the gamut between everything from a basic exam all the way through overnight hospitalization, multiday hospitalizations, critical care, trauma, emergency surgery [is important],” she added.
But making sure the hospital can operate at its highest level also means bringing in the needed staffing to match the space. The trio said they plan to, aside from themselves, hire at least another five vets in the near term and up to 14 over the next few years.
The plan, for now, is to hire up to 35 employees ranging from vet techs to vet tech assistants to a practice manager and client liaison, they said. They are already in the process of conducting interviews.
The vets plan to do community outreach starting next month to make Santa Feans — and Northern New Mexicans — aware of the hospital that will open this year. They say bringing the emergency hospital to Santa Fe will help general practices with the overflow of patients, some of whom they have to deny because of the amount of requests for care they already get.
“I really want to help relieve the burden of our general practices that have really, since the pandemic, just been working so hard,” Sims said. “We hope [the hospital] will take some of that burden off.”
