Preparations to renovate Virginia Tech’s Veterinary Teaching Hospital are underway now that the university’s board of visitors has approved initial spending on the project.
The board on Wednesday authorized $4.3 million to complete designs and working drawings for the project, which is expected to cost a total of $43 million. Once completed, the expanded small-animal part of the hospital will have 25,000 square feet of renovated space along with 32,000 square feet of space in the form of an addition onto the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine’s facility on Duck Pond Drive, in the southwest corner of Tech’s Blacksburg campus.
The renovation will create new exam and surgery rooms, as well as additional space for intensive care, physical therapy and the hospital pharmacy. Improvements will be focused on the small-animal part of the facility; the teaching hospital also serves large animals in a different portion of the building.
The Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine, established in 1978, has outgrown its teaching clinic, said hospital director Tanya LeRoith.
When the school’s small-animal hospital was built in 1987, the veterinary school had about 80 students per class. Now, each class has about 127 students, LeRoith said. Veterinary students gain clinical experience by working in the hospital primarily during the second half of their four-year doctor of veterinary medicine program.
“We continuously have students in the clinic,” she said.
As the veterinary school has grown, the teaching hospital has also expanded its services to accommodate the needs of the community, LeRoith said. The hospital now offers emergency care and specialties such as dermatology, ophthalmology and cardiology. The small-animal clinic cares for about 13,000 dogs and cats annually, with 1,900 of these family pets receiving care during overnight stays.
“We’re pretty creative about making use of our small space,” she said, but it’s hard to keep increasing the number of clients due to space constraints. “Just finding an office for one of our supervisors who needs to have a private conversation with someone is difficult,” she said.
The veterinary school kicked off a campaign in 2022 to raise money for the expansion through philanthropic contributions. Virginia Tech promised $7 million toward the total. It wasn’t clear Wednesday how much has been raised from donors so far; a spokesperson from the veterinary school hadn’t responded to a query by Wednesday evening.
LeRoith said the expansion will help the veterinary school compete when recruiting both students and faculty. Several other vet schools the same age as or older than Tech’s have recently renovated or added space, including the University of Wisconsin, which doubled its small-animal hospital when it opened a new expansion this spring.
Groundbreaking isn’t expected to take place for about two years.
As planning for the expansion gets underway, the unique needs of the hospital’s patients will need to be kept in mind, LeRoith said. “We don’t have the ability to shut down the hospital” during the project, she said. “We have to be really mindful of cat patients.”
Cats, she said, are especially sensitive to loud noise.
Correction, Aug. 29: Completion time for the expansion project is unclear, and groundbreaking may not take place for about two years. An earlier version of this story noted an earlier timeline due to incorrect information on the veterinary school’s website.