Dr. Kimberly A. Atkinson-Spinks
Twenty seven years of veterinary practice, most of it spent in people's homes at the moment it mattered most.
Why she built H.E.A.R.T.
Dr. Atkinson-Spinks has spent a long career in every corner of veterinary medicine: teaching, hospital ownership, medical direction and emergency practice. Across all of it, one part of the work kept asking for more of her attention than the rest.
She is a Certified Veterinary Acupuncturist and a certified member of the International Association for Animal Hospice and Palliative Care, the body that sets the standards of practice for animal hospice worldwide.
She has been performing in-home euthanasia for more than twenty seven years, and she is certain that home is the most compassionate place for an animal to pass. H.E.A.R.T. is what she built when she decided to give that conviction her whole practice rather than the corners of it.
The name says the intention plainly: Helping Each Animal Rest Tranquilly.
Education and credentials
- Doctor of Veterinary Medicine, Washington State University College of Veterinary Medicine
- Certified Veterinary Acupuncturist
- Certified member of the International Association for Animal Hospice and Palliative Care
- Licensed and in practice for more than twenty seven years
- More than twenty seven years of in-home euthanasia experience
- One of the founding members of the Washington State University Pet Loss Hotline, which supported grieving families for two decades
Certified member of the International Association for Animal Hospice and Palliative Care, the body that sets the standards of practice for animal hospice worldwide.
Leadership and clinical experience
- Instructor at the College of Veterinary Medicine, University of the West Indies, Trinidad and Tobago
- Owner of a state-of-the-art, community-loved veterinary hospital in New York City
- Medical Director at hospitals across the United States and locally on Vancouver Island
- Emergency practitioner within the past year in both Nanaimo and Seattle
Grief work is part of the medicine
Dr. Atkinson-Spinks was one of the founders of the Washington State University Pet Loss Hotline, a service staffed by trained veterinary students that went on to support grieving families for two decades before it closed. The people who called it were, more often than not, people with nowhere else to take the question.
Helping to build something like that changes how a veterinarian practises. It teaches you that the animal is only half of the room, and that the questions people cannot bring themselves to ask out loud are usually the ones they most need answered.
That is why a H.E.A.R.T. visit is built around conversation as much as around treatment, and why you are welcome to phone afterwards.
Eastern and western medicine together
Acupuncture and cold laser therapy are not alternatives to good pain management. They sit alongside it, and for many older patients they make the difference between a medication dose that works and one that leaves them dull.
Dr. Atkinson-Spinks uses whichever combination gives an individual animal the most comfortable day, and says plainly when something is unlikely to help.
Families often remember how the experience felt for just as long as they remember the medicine. Both deserve real skill.
Dr. Kimberly A. Atkinson-SpinksYou can call before you are ready to book.
Many families phone simply to ask what happens, what it costs, or whether it is too soon. That call is welcome, and it is free.