This Is Our Story
Haywood Animal Hospital is a full-service veterinary facility that truly represents our passion to provide quality health care to your four-legged, furry family members. What’s really exciting is our facility is equipped for not only treatment and preventive care, but for pet development and training, as well.
We know how important your pets are to you and your families. That’s why we’re continually striving for your trust and confidence when it comes to their medical care and their overall well being. From routine examinations and grooming to end-of-life compassion, our expertly-trained staff will provide individualized experiences that you and your pets deserve.
Our History
Haywood Road Animal Hospital was originally founded by Dr. Wayne Creel in the early 1970s and gets its name directly from its location - Haywood Road. Dr. Creel was extremely passionate about veterinary dentistry and at a time when boarded veterinary dentists did not exist. He created Haywood Road as a place to send area referrals for advanced dental work and surgery.
With Dr. Creel’s health declining, he sold the practice to Dr. Amanda and Erik Shoemake in the fall of 2020. The Shoemakes weren’t new to practice ownership, as they already owned another small practice in North Carolina. They had developed a passion for seeing their practice grow and improve with stellar medicine, customer service, and just plain hard work. Dr. Shoemake works at Haywood Road Animal Hospital one day a week, and Erik is there several days a week acting as hospital administrator.
We make it our mission to care for your pets as if they were our own.
We believe in living this mission every day by providing our clients with medical recommendations that offer gold standard medicine, the same that we as doctors would provide for our own pets. Every day we strive to provide this level of care with lots of love, patience and kindness in each and every visit.
Our culture is built on the foundation of team-oriented and family-friendly. We spend a lot of hours together and at times in highly stressful situations. We laugh together, cry together and support one another. We genuinely believe that this allows us to better care for each other, our patients and our clients.
Our Values
- Collaboration - we have a lot of combined experience, and what’s even better, we often collaborate to bring extra knowledge and experience to each patient and case
- Family Oriented - we consider ourselves a team and we consider our patients family
- Compassionate - above anything else, we provide compassion; regardless of your financial abilities, we strive to offer the best medical care that we can to your pet, excelling in compassion toward both our patient and their owner
- Low Stress Handling - while we have to keep our staff safe, the utmost concern is your pet’s safety and wellbeing; we do not push them beyond their comfort level just to get things done and we strive to keep their stress as low as possible
Our Team
Haley was hired by Dr. Creel in 2013. Some would say that she was his “right hand woman” right up until his retirement. She helped ensure that the ownership transition was as seamless as possible. Her passion is unparalleled and we are thrilled to still have her at Haywood Road Animal Hospital. After the transition of ownership, she finished her veterinary technician licensing program and she is now officially a Licensed Veterinary Technician! We think the world of Haley and are so grateful to continue forward with her as a part of the team.
Hannah originally carried the responsibility of overseeing our kennels and is another fantastic team member from before the ownership transition. She is passionate about animal care and showed this with her concern for ensuring all boarders were provided with expert care and safety. With the age and condition of the current runs, we made attempts to address them before ultimately deciding to focus our efforts on ensuring that Haywood Road was a stellar animal hospital, closing the boarding facility for good. Hannah was paramount in this decision.
Dr. Hilliard joined the Haywood Road team in 2021. She was previously at a corporate hospital and felt while she was there that her quality of care and attention to the clients was compromised. She now says that she wouldn’t survive without this clinic. It is her second home and family.
Come Meet Our Team or check out our Virtual Tour!
What makes us different?
What sets Haywood Road Animal Hospital apart is how much the entire team truly cares. This practice is a huge part of Dr. Amanda Shoemake and her husband, Erik Shoemake’s lives. Their kids frequent the hospital and are involved with so much of the day to day, even with them at home. Dr. Shoemake and Erik are dedicated to ensuring that this practice and team succeed in so many ways. They care deeply about the patients and their loving families. Ensuring that each patient receives gold standard medicine v. mediocre treatments is incredibly important. The physical health, mental health and well-being of the Haywood Road team matters greatly to Dr. Shoemake and she finds herself caring and worrying for them, just as she would any of her blood-related family members.
We strive to always do what is best for our patients. We are able to base our prices on many independent factors within our hospital and community, versus having to follow the “corporate cookie-cutter models”. We are able to offer more in-house pharmacy options, because again, we don’t have a corporation dictating the products and medications we can stock.
Our owners and managers get to know the clients and patients as much as the staff does, allowing us to be familiar with what is happening within the hospital at any given time.
We are proud to offer the following unique services:
- We offer cold laser therapy, which can make a huge difference in so many disease processes.
- We are open Monday-Friday from 7:30am until 5:30pm.
- We are closed on weekends and major holidays to allow our team to focus on their own wellness and time with their families. We are lucky to be able to have wonderful emergency care available in the area for the times that our team is not available.
- We do a lot of basic dentistry and surgical dentistry.
- We are passionate about dog and cat teeth and know that it can make a huge difference in how a pet feels and acts. We feel strongly that full mouth x-rays should be the standard of care and we perform them during all dental cleaning procedures, at no additional cost.
- We also do soft tissue surgery and have a team of doctors who are skilled in current surgical techniques. We can often do procedures that many other hospitals may refer to specialists. We have several referral centers in the area that we can refer to, and we also have a board certified internist who brings his services (ultrasound, consultations and endoscopy) directly to us!
Community & Philanthropy
We find ourselves beyond fortunate to work with this rescue and provide all of their veterinary care. Boxer Butts and Other Mutts is absolutely incredible and provides not only rescue for our community but communities for miles and miles around us. They have even been known to raise funds for our clients that may be struggling financially to provide the medical care that they need for their pet. It is our honor to give back to our community by offering special discounts to Boxer Butts and Other Mutts as well as providing donations whenever possible. This partnership allows us to continue caring for pets in our own community that may otherwise go without veterinary care.
Our Location
Haywood Road Animal Hospital is located just a few miles from the downtown area of Greenville, South Carolina and in close proximity to the Haywood Mall. Greenville is home to the beautiful Reedy River and boasts many outdoor adventures, beautiful hiking trails and an amazing food and brewery scene.