A Pet Hospital Is Coming to State Street

The at 158 State Street grew yesterday with the decision by the New Haven Central Hospital for Veterinary Medicine — a 24/7 area staple in veterinary medicine for nearly 40 years — to join the other health facilities there.

Ken Aldrich, who serves as hospital administrator, explained that there is a subgroup of referral and emergency hospitals in veterinary medicine within the larger group of general practitioners.

“We belong to this smaller group,” he said.

The hospital for veterinary medicine has leased 20,000 sq. ft. in the Crossroads Medical Center.  This nearly triples the size of the hospital’s small, one-story brick building along a heavily shaded section of State Street in New Haven. 

According to Aldrich, the larger space will permit the hospital to increase its level of physical therapy for its orthopedic patients and also offer increased imaging services.  He said the current plan is for the new facility to have an MRI.

In addition, the hospital will continue its services in ultrasound and telemedicine, with veterinarians sending X-rays, digitally or otherwise, for review by the hospital’s radiologist.

Aldrich emphasized that the veterinary hospital is not a large animal hospital—the kind of hospital, for instance, that practices equine medicine.  Rather, he said, roughly 90 percent of its patients are cats and dogs, with a sprinkling of exotics such as flying squirrels, snakes and lizards among the clientele.

“We’ve been looking for a space for roughly 10 years,” Aldrich said.  “We worked with multiple different towns and different real estate groups.  We’ve been very picky about finding the right location for what we need.

“We needed a location with good highway access.  We wanted a location that appropriately reflected the type of medicine that we practice.  We try to practice cutting edge medicine. We wanted to insure that the neighborhood we were going into appropriately reflected that,” he said of an area that gathers a number of health initiatives, the Yale-New Haven Hospital facility and the Gaylord Wellness facility among them.  “We thought that that fit us nicely.” 

The hospital expects to move into the Crossroads Building, which it will share with a group of cardiologists, in September of 2013. 

That, according to Aldrich, is a result of the kind of veterinary medicine they practice and the size of the space where they will practice it.

“Twenty thousand square feet is not a small space,” he said.  “We will have generators set up in case of power outages, special plumbing so you can get oxygen in . . . There’s a lot of additional things.”

The Branford office of O, R & L Commercial LLC brokered the transaction.

Editor's Note: The original version of this article incorrectly stated that the facility is a full outpatient clinic.