Moving to a new vet: how to bring your pet's history with you

Verified 7 October 2026 · general information, not legal or veterinary advice

People change vets for ordinary reasons. You move suburb. The clinic you liked loses the vet you liked. The fees change, or the parking does, or you want a second opinion on something and never go back.

Whatever the reason, the part that trips people up is the history. Your new vet starts with a blank page unless somebody fills it in, and the record sitting at your old clinic is the practice’s document, not yours (we go through who owns it here).

The good news is that there is a route that works almost everywhere, and most owners don’t know about it.

The one thing worth knowing

Don’t ask your old clinic for a copy. Ask your new clinic to request it.

This sounds like a technicality. It isn’t. Right across the country, the boards write about vet-to-vet transfer in far stronger language than they use about handing a copy to an owner. Western Australia’s guidance is about this exact moment:

The ACT is explicit that it does not matter which of you asks:

And Tasmania puts it as an obligation rather than an expectation:

Victoria’s guideline points the same way: on an owner’s formal request, a practitioner should provide the record to another practitioner, whether for a second opinion or because care is moving. The Australian Veterinary Association’s policy agrees — records can be released to another vet with the client’s authorisation.

So the useful sentence is: “I authorise you to send my pet’s records to [new clinic].” That is a different request from “send me my file”, and it lands in a much better place.

How to do it, start to finish

1. Register with the new clinic first. They can’t request records for an animal that isn’t their patient. Book the first appointment, even if it’s weeks away.
2. Tell them where the history lives. Clinic name and suburb is usually enough. If you’ve used more than one over the years, say so — they’ll ask the most recent one first.
3. Give your authorisation in writing. An email is fine. Some clinics have a form; most are happy with a line of text. Template below.
4. Say what matters most. “Ongoing arthritis medication and last year’s bloods” gets you a more useful transfer than a blanket request, and it is far quicker for the clinic to action.
5. Give it a week, then check. Not with the old clinic — with the new one, who will know whether it arrived.

A request you can copy

Two versions. The first is the one to use.

To your new clinic — the recommended route

To your old clinic — if you’d rather start that end

Two small things that make either one work better. Use the name the account is in, which is not always the name on the appointment. And give a date range rather than asking for everything since the beginning — it is a smaller job, and smaller jobs get done sooner.

What to bring yourself

Some things you should already have, and they fill the gap while the transfer happens:

• Vaccination certificates. Issued to owners as a matter of course. A boarding kennel or groomer will want these long before your new vet needs the full history.
• Invoices and receipts. These carry more clinical detail than people expect — procedure names, drug names, doses, dates.
• Microchip number, and which registry holds it.
• Current medication — the actual box or label, with the strength and the dose. A photograph is enough.
• Your own notes on what has been going on: when the limp started, how long they’ve been drinking more, what the last weight was.

That last one is the one people wish they had. A new vet meeting your animal for the first time has no baseline, and “she’s lost about a kilo since autumn” is genuinely useful clinical information that exists nowhere except in your head.

The awkward cases

Your old clinic has closed or been sold

This is more common than you’d think, and the rules do cover it. In the ACT, a practitioner selling, transferring or closing a practice “is obliged to notify clients of what is going to be done with their animal’s records” — by a notice in the practice, a newspaper notice, or writing to clients whose animals are mid-treatment. In Tasmania the responsibility for the records stays with the original practitioner even after they sell or close, and even if they are no longer registered.

So start with whoever took over the premises, then the board in your state, which can sometimes say where records went. The ACT standards contemplate the Board determining the fate of residual records as a last resort.

You’re moving interstate

The transfer itself works the same way. What changes is the rules that apply once the record arrives: retention periods and access rules are set by each state, so the file ends up governed by a different board than the one it was written under. This matters mainly for timing — if you’re leaving a state whose clinic you may never deal with again, do the transfer before you go, not after.

You’re getting a second opinion, not moving

Say so plainly. Victoria’s guideline names a second opinion as one of the situations where a practitioner should send the record on at the owner’s formal request, and no clinic should treat it as a loss of confidence. Tasmania goes further in a way worth knowing: if a client declines to authorise the release of prior records to a second-opinion vet, the client must be warned about the possible complications of treating without them.

They send the original rather than a copy

Occasionally a clinic sends original films or paperwork. In Tasmania an original “must be returned to the first opinion veterinary practitioner as soon as practicable”, and the ACT asks that where a record is transferred without a copy being kept, a note is made of where it went. If you are handed anything original, it is not yours to keep — photograph it and pass it on.

If the transfer doesn’t happen

Usually it is not a refusal. It is a small practice with one person on reception and a request that arrived during a busy week. Ask your new clinic to follow up — vet to vet, it tends to move.

If it really is a refusal, two things are worth knowing. In most of the country a refusal on its own is not something a board will investigate, so lodging a complaint is unlikely to produce the document. But refusing another vet is treated differently from refusing you. South Australia’s board takes the view that declining a request from another veterinarian, where that leads to an adverse outcome for the animal, may amount to professional misconduct. Tasmania requires a justification to be given when a request is declined.

In the meantime, ask for a summary rather than the file. It is a different and much smaller request, it is what several boards describe as sufficient anyway, and it is very often granted the same day.

The part that moves with you automatically

Every one of the problems above exists because the history lives somewhere you don’t control. The record you keep yourself doesn’t need transferring. It is already with you when you walk into the new clinic, it covers the years before this vet ever met your animal, and it doesn’t care which state you moved to.

Questions people ask

Sources

• Veterinary Surgeons’ Board of Western Australia — Veterinary Clinical Record keeping Guidelines, endorsed July 2021
• Veterinary Board of Tasmania — Veterinary Service Standards and Guidance Notes, effective 1 July 2023 (clauses 4.20–4.23, 7.7–7.9)
• ACT Veterinary Surgeons Board — Veterinary Surgeons (Standards Statement) Approval 2017 (No 1), NI2017-445, Schedule 1 cl 5.3
• Veterinary Practitioners Registration Board of Victoria — Guideline 07, Veterinary medical records, updated 9 April 2024
• Veterinary Surgeons Board of South Australia — guidance on veterinary records
• Australian Veterinary Association — policy on retention of medical records and diagnostic images

All accessed 7 October 2026.