The clinic that won twice

Dr. Lester Schwab is a veterinarian with vision. When Dr. Roger Kuhn bought Valley Veterinary Hospital in Walnut Creek, Calif., from him in 1979, Dr. Schwab was already imagining more and better things, regardless of how good he was already at delivering pet healthcare. "Les could work like crazy, see four clients in 15 minutes, and fully use his staff, and everybody was happy," Dr. Kuhn says.

Veterinary Economics recognized Dr. Schwab's vision twice. Both of Valley Veterinary Hospital's building projects won first prize in Hospital Design competitions in the August 1965 issue and again in the April 1972 issue.

Both times Dr. Schwab used forward-thinking architect John Lovejoy. He found Lovejoy by asking who'd built a particularly impressive monkey cage at the Oakland Zoo.

Lovejoy and Dr. Schwab's winning design in 1972 was ahead of its time. Here's what Dr. Schwab said about it then: "Our physical plant and the equipment we have here permit us to do things an individual veterinarian alone cannot afford to do. He may be providing outstanding medical services at his practice, but there will be times when he will need to expand his own facilities, on short notice, for a specific case. We believe that there should be full-service facilities like these in all areas of the country."

That sounds an awful lot like the argument for specialists and emergency hospitals today. Dr. Schwab's hope was that the hospital would eventually serve as a specialty center and that less-urgent and common cases would be treated at smaller outlying clinics in the area. Specialty facilities, while becoming more common today, sounded threatening back then, Dr. Kuhn says. "Dr. Schwab told me that when he had his open house, other veterinarians came just so they could tell him they were going to run him out of business," he says.

The facility in Walnut Creek, 12 miles west of Oakland, was built like no other private veterinary practice for hundreds of miles around, Dr. Kuhn says. Its surgery room had four tables, big human-hospital-sized hallways for foot traffic, a dedicated postmortem room, and infectious disease wards with separate heating and air conditioning systems.

But after building a stellar hospital, Dr. Schwab had trouble holding onto his surgeons and specialists. They would return to academia or start practices of their own. Vaccines did away with many of the worst diseases that necessitated the eight-cage infectious disease ward and the postmortem room. Dr. Kuhn himself had turned down a job at Valley Veterinary Hospital a few years before Dr. Schwab named his selling price: five times what Dr. Kuhn wanted to pay. "Later, he gave me my price," Dr. Kuhn says.

Dr. Schwab went on to establish a smaller outlying clinic in a shopping center, and although his idea of a central facility with satellite clinics never came to fruition, Valley Veterinary Hospital still stands as a testament to his forethought in location and design. Decades later, it hasn't needed much extra work. "It's a great facility," Dr. Kuhn says. ?We put on a new roof and did some landscaping and hardscaping, and that's it."

Flooring, cabinetry, room layouts-they've all worked for years. The facility is large enough to accommodate as many doctors as it needs. The community is aging, Dr. Kuhn says, but he predicts that eventually a new generation of office workers will populate the well-designed suburban city and guarantee another boom for Valley Veterinary Clinic.

Dr. Kuhn has been a visionary himself. His plan was always to own multiple practices (he also owns hospitals in San Francisco and Danville), and he foresaw a corporate environment in which his team members wouldn't even know who he was. "I had a manager in each hospital running the same systems, but other people doing the details," he says.

Dr. Kuhn was also on the ground floor at Banfield, The Pet Hospital, as one of the five people involved in its inception. He marketed the idea of corporate practice to veterinarians, but his wife "wasn't prepared for corporate life," which had Dr. Kuhn traveling 180 days of the year. He went back to his own practices and focused on perfecting his own system.

Today he's mostly retired from veterinary practice, focusing instead on his clinics' Web presence and encouraging his new associates to stretch themselves a little more, approach surgeries with confidence, and tackle difficult medical problems in general practice.

"We're focusing on our new doctors," Dr. Kuhn says. "It isn't that they don't know what to do. It's that they're afraid something might go wrong."