Since the shopping center at S. Main and Ann Arbor-Saline opened, feline and canine members of local families have received care from four different vet practices occupying the same storefront–a sole practitioner, a corporate chain, another corporate chain, and most recently, a partner-owned wellness/urgent care practice.

Ken Genova opened Woodland Animal Hospital as a sole practitioner in 1991. He’d previously been a partner at Westgate Animal Clinic, founded the Animal Emergency Clinic on Packard, and worked in business operations for Professional Veterinary Hospitals of America, one of the first corporate veterinary chains in the county. Genova sold Woodland to another chain, Pet Practice, in 1994 (he now owns several clinics in Portland, Oregon). And two years later, the Veterinary Centers of America (VCA) acquired Pet Practice’s eighty-six clinics. That gave VCA 160 hospitals in twenty-one states, making it the largest vet chain in the United States at that time.

Why VCA chose to close the Woodland Plaza clinic remains unknown–calls to the company were not returned. But after standing vacant for six months, the clinic reopened in February as Compassionate Care Animal Hospital. And in a return to the model Genova started with, it’s owned by two of the vets who practice there, Michele Forbes and Cynthia Barker.

After working together at local general practices and emergency hospitals, the vets began planning their own clinic in 2010. Forbes says that they hope “to fill the niche between general vet practices and emergency hospitals” by offering early and late business hours (7 a.m.-5 p.m. on Friday, 9 a.m.-10 p.m. Monday and Thursday) at no extra charge, as well as round-the-clock emergency care for established clients. “For the well-being of the patient, we do not handle emergencies for non-client animals,” she emails. But “anyone can call us when we are open, get an appointment, develop a client/patient relationship, and then benefit from our after-hours phone services.”

It sounds like a recipe for physician burnout, but Forbes says everyone puts in a regular workweek: “We just have extra people to cover the extended hours, including a third vet,” Sarah Kemner. But, she adds, “we all stay until all the patients are cared for, regardless of our schedules.”

The mother of three young sons, Forbes compares Compassionate Care’s approach to IHA, St. Joe’s giant human medicine practice. “It is just like the IHA model,” she emails. “If you are a patient at IHA, you can use their urgent care facility. We just provide all the services in one place!”