RSS Electronic Edition | Newsletters Subscribe | Contact Us Customer Service | Community Buy Photos Modmomsclub

Featured Stories

Friday, May. 08, 2009

Pioneer Equine Hospital offers state-of-the-art horse care

Oakdale vet invests $4 million

E-Mail Print reprint or license

OAKDALE — Even Brad Jackman admits his new $4 million equine hospital is lacking in creature comforts, and there's a very good reason for that.

It was built to comfort creatures.

The Pioneer Equine Hospital, which opened last month at Cleveland Avenue and Valley Home Road, is a state-of-the-art facility exclusively for the treatment of horses. Humans may find the hospital a little stark and cold, since horses and carpets don't mix well, and pigs and goats need not apply.

"We treat all kinds of horses," Jackman said. "A lot of hunter-jumpers, dressage — that's kind of our niche. We do a lot of lameness work, trying to figure out where and why the horses are sore. We do a lot of emergency surgery."

Pioneer Hospital has been around since 1973, opened by veterinarians Jerry Black, who still practices there, and John Britton at a spot about 1.5 miles from the new location. Jackman, 45 and a Kansas native, joined the hospital in 1995, became a partner the next year and bought out Black in 2007.

By that time, plans were well under way to move the bulk of the practice to a 20-acre parcel roughly a mile off Highway 120. The original site still is home to the hospital's reproductive facility.

"We were doing the same work at the old facility, but we were limited by space," Jackman said. "We couldn't bring in some of the newer technology. There was a need for even more work to be done, and the old facility didn't have room for the doctors I needed to bring in to do the work."

The new Pioneer hospital includes a 22,000-square-foot main building that houses two surgery rooms, four recovery stalls, exam rooms, a radiology center, an MRI room, conference rooms and lounges with windows allowing staff and owners to observe surgeries, a full pharmacy, and dorms for interns.

That's only the main building.

The site is home to a 42,000-square-foot arena with three surfaces to conduct lameness exams, two 20-stall barns, 16 outpatient pens and a farrier shop for shoeing.

The project was designed and built by Holman Craftsmen, an Oakdale firm owned by Dan Holman, with John Pronoitis of Ceres as the project coordinator. Holman and Pronoitis own horses, which Pronoitis said came in handy when addressing and solving the hundreds of details involved in the construction process.

"Dan and I were here full time for about 2½ years," Pronoitis said. "The whole time you're building a facility like this you have to think about what the horse is going to do, how it's going to react."

Everything protruding in areas where horses will be walking is mounted at least 4 feet, 8 inches off the floor, to keep the horses from hurting themselves when rubbing against the walls. All hoses, lights, monitors and other equipment are suspended from the ceilings.

"Working closely with Dr. Jackman was key, because we didn't know how horses react in hospitals or how to take care of a horse in these situations," Pronoitis said. "Dan and I both know how horses act, since we both own horses, but we needed the medical input."

The old Pioneer hospital has one surgery room and one recovery room, severely limiting the amount of work Jackman, Black and the other staff members could perform.

"With two surgery rooms and four recovery stalls, we can presumptively do three times as many surgeries here as we could at the old place," Jackman said. "We can be more efficient because we have more room, and we're typically running 20-25 appointments a day through this facility."

The hospital was remarkably quiet on a recent visit. One of the surgery rooms was busy as a horse was having an abscess removed from a hind leg, and three horses were being handled in the arena as doctors watched for evidence of lameness.

Behind and to the side of the arena, flags mark where additional stables and outbuildings may be located as demand grows. Jackman, for one, is confident that will happen once horse owners see his hospital.

"We think there's the need for this kind of facility in Northern California," Jackman said. "We can do every procedure here that can be done at UC Davis, and we give people that second option. We want to recruit the best doctors to work here, and the best doctors want to work at the best facilities."

Bee staff writer Brian VanderBeek can be reached at bvanderbeek@modbee.com or 578-2300.