A change of vet tempts people into rewriting the entire contact list, and that is how errors creep into entries that were working perfectly well. This update is surgical. Of the five entries the list holds, a mobile number for you plus a second route to you, a nearby trusted person with a way into your home, the practice you use, the overnight service behind that practice, and the person caring for her at the moment, only two belong to the veterinary world. Those two change completely. The other three should be read, confirmed as still true, and otherwise left alone.
Replacing the Practice Entry Properly
Your usual vet ceases to be the old practice the day you register elsewhere, and the new practice takes that entry with its full details: name, address and the number the practice itself tells you to use for urgent calls, which is not always the main reception line. Register her before you need the entry in anger, because a practice that has never opened a file for her may still treat her in an emergency, yet the call runs faster when her name, your name and her history are already on their system. Note the date the registration took effect on your own copy if you keep one, so a future reader can tell which version of the list was current during any past incident.
Do not let the old practice linger on the list as a second vet just in case. Two practice entries invite a caller under pressure to pick the familiar name, and the old practice no longer holds the current relationship or, once records move, an up-to-date file. Her history with that practice matters and should be preserved in her records, but the emergency list is a dialing tool, and it should point at one practice only: the new one.
The Out-of-Hours Entry Is a Separate Question
The out-of-hours service needs its own investigation, because the new practice may not use the arrangement you are used to. Some practices handle their own overnight calls, some share a rotation with neighboring practices, and some hand everything to a dedicated emergency hospital in another town. Ask the new practice directly who answers at night and at weekends, write that service's number into the entry, and check whether the location differs from the daytime address, since a night drive to the wrong building wastes the very minutes the list exists to save. Test the number once outside practice hours and listen to the greeting, confirming you have reached the service the practice described.
This is the entry people are prone to copy lazily from the old list, because the old out-of-hours number looks plausible and familiar. Resist that. If the new practice uses the same emergency provider as the old one, the entry will coincidentally match, but it should match because you verified it, not because you carried it over unexamined.
Moving the Records and Freezing Everything Else
Ask the previous practice to send her complete history to the new one, then confirm with the new practice that the history has arrived and been filed, rather than assuming the transfer completed because you requested it. Gaps surface later at unhelpful moments, and a short call now closes them. Once the transfer is confirmed, update every copy of the contact list on the same day: the version at home, any copy a sitter holds, and any version a cattery keeps, so no one can dial the retired practice from a stale sheet.
Then freeze the rest. Your own numbers have not changed because your vet has, the nearby person's key still opens your door, and her current carer is whoever it was yesterday. Reading those three entries aloud once is enough to confirm them. The discipline of changing only what the event actually changed keeps a reliable list reliable. Pet Passport in KinsLe carries the amended list as the sole current record, with the incoming practice and its overnight cover in place and the household entries untouched.