A practice closure notice often arrives as a short letter or a sign on the door, and owners understandably focus on finding a new vet. The records deserve equal urgency, because your cat's history of vaccinations, investigations, and responses to past illness is far easier to obtain while the team is still answering phones than months later.
Where the records usually go
Clinical files do not simply vanish when a practice closes. They are commonly transferred to a buying practice, passed to a nominated successor, or retained by the business or its professional representatives for the required keeping period, with clients directed to a contact for access. The weak point is the handover itself: announcements get missed, deadlines for requesting copies pass, and a file that ends up archived off-site can take far longer to retrieve when a new vet needs it during treatment.
Request your own complete copy, and ask early
Ask for more than the vaccination card. A complete copy means consultation notes, vaccination and parasite prevention history, laboratory results, imaging reports, surgical and dental records, and notes on ongoing conditions and how your cat responded to previous care. Request it in a portable format you can store and share, confirm the microchip number recorded matches your cat, and check the pages actually cover the whole history rather than only recent visits. If the practice gives a deadline for requests, treat it as firm even if you feel the closure is still some way off.
Set the history up properly with the new vet
Choose the next practice before the old one shuts if you can, and have the file sent there directly as well as keeping your own copy, so the new team can read the background before your first appointment rather than during it. Flag anything time-sensitive yourself: a booster approaching its due date, a condition under monitoring, or a recheck the closing vet had planned. At the first visit, confirm the new practice has received everything and that your contact details and emergency preferences are recorded correctly in their system.
If you only hear about the closure late
Sometimes the first sign is a locked door or a disconnected phone line. Work in writing from there: contact any successor practice named in closure notices, check the practice's website or social pages for where files were sent, and ask your new vet to request the history practice-to-practice, since clinics are often better placed to trace transferred files than individual owners. Keep copies of your requests and dates, and reconstruct what you can in the meantime from your own vaccination card, insurance claims, receipts, and microchip registration, so treatment is never waiting on a perfect archive.
The lesson a closure teaches every owner
Owners who already hold their own copies barely notice a closure administratively; owners who never asked become chasers of archived files. Whatever your practice's situation, request a copy of your cat's records now and after any significant treatment, and store it somewhere you control. Keeping that copy in KinsLe's Pet Passport puts your cat's history in one portable packet under your own access, so no closure, move, or change of vet can separate you from it.