Clinic spotlight - Tropical Vets Innisfail, in the community more than 50 years
For Dr Georgia, walking into Tropical Vets Innisfail every day is a bit like coming full circle. Long before she was treating pets large and small through the clinic's doors, she was bringing her own horses in for routine vet care throughout her childhood.
The Innisfail clinic was the first of Tropical Vets’ offerings in FNQ, opening over 50 years ago. One of the clinic's earlier vets even used to tell Georgia, "Anyone can be a vet if you put your mind to it." Now, she’s part of the team carrying on that legacy for the next generation of Innisfail pet and livestock owners.
A clinic built for the tropics
Tropical Vets Innisfail is set up to handle just about anything that walks, trots, or is carried through the door.
On the small animal side, the clinic offers full consult services, preventative care and vaccinations, alongside a dedicated procedures room for dentals, abscess drains, and wound treatment, and a separate surgery room equipped for spays, castrates, lump removals, and orthopaedic procedures. That includes femoral head ostectomies (FHOs), where the ball joint of the hip is removed to relieve pain and arthritis in dogs and cats with hip issues, and TTAs, a knee reconstruction surgery for dogs who've injured their cruciate ligament.
For horse owners, the clinic runs a dental trailer that can travel to properties, complete with a mobile crush to safely hold equine patients for dental work, ultrasounds, and pre-breeding mare scans. Many other procedures, such as geldings, hernia repairs, and lameness workups, are done on-site at properties as well. If you’re looking to have x-rays, Tropical Vets Innisfail offer this as well, provided there’s a concrete area and power onsite.
Horses can also be brought to the clinic itself, where there is a dedicated space behind the main building, a handy option for clients wanting to cut down on travel costs. The team also treats eye injuries in horses, often fitting a sub-palpebral lavage system so owners can medicate conditions without having to handle the eye directly.
On the cattle front, Innisfail handles emergency work like prolapses and difficult calvings, along with lameness cases, pregnancy testing, and disease investigations, including post-mortems.
Who you'll see in the waiting room
Innisfail's tropical climate shapes a lot of what comes through the clinic doors, Georgia says. Skin concerns for dogs and cats make up a huge portion of consults.
"It gets so hot in summer and so humid... probably 80% of appointments, if they're not a vaccine, are a skin consult," Georgia explains.
Hotspots and tick paralysis are also common in the warmer, wetter months, and it’s important to make sure your dogs and cats are up to date with their parasite prevention.
A day in the life
No two days look quite the same for the team at Innisfail, but the clinic typically runs with two vets rotating between consults and surgery, each supported by a dedicated nurse, plus a hospital nurse looking after inpatients.
Surgery patients are admitted first thing in the morning, with procedures usually wrapped up by early afternoon, in time for outpatients to go home around school pick-up.
Ask Georgia what her ideal day looks like, and it’s all about variety: "a horse gelding offsite in the morning, come back to clinic, do some surgeries and then go into consults and chat with clients in the afternoon."
Why Georgia loves it
For Georgia, the reward isn't just in the medicine, it's in the community. "I just feel like I'm giving back to the community where I grew up," she says. "I love it when I’m seeing clients that I've known before I was a vet and outside of work, and I get to help them out, save, or look after their animals."
It's that connection, built over a lifetime in the community, that makes Tropical Vets Innisfail feel less like a clinic and more like part of the local landscape on the Cassowary Coast.
