Pain and quality-of-life assessment for dogs and cats
A clear line of sight.
Seeing what they cannot say.
Short weekly check-ins become the Sightline Score, a single trajectory you and your vet can read at a glance. The methodology is built and signed by working UK vets, not a diagnosis of your pet.
You see them every day, which is exactly why the slow changes are the hardest to read. Pain in pets is measurable. So is quality of life.
The blind spot
The pet you see every day is the hardest to read.
It is hard to know whether your pet is having a good week or a bad one when you see them every day. Subtle changes in mobility, comfort or appetite are easy to miss in the moment, and difficult to compare against last month.
Your vet sees these things in fifteen-minute snapshots. Pain in dogs and cats is famously underdetected, and small declines often go unnoticed until they are not small.
Sightline gives you a structured way to record how your pet is doing each week, so you and your vet are looking at the same picture when it matters.
Two working clinicians who have spent years asking owners variations of "how has she been?" in the consult room, and watching how hard that question is to answer well from memory alone. Their oversight covers how Sightline is designed and maintained in general, not a diagnosis of your individual pet.
How Sightline works
Eight domains. A weekly score. A trajectory.
Sightline asks the questions a vet would ask in clinic, in plain English. The 44-item assessment branches by your pet's species, age, conditions and why you are here, so a healthy young dog after an operation sees a different short subset than a senior cat in palliative care. Most pets check in weekly, twelve to sixteen questions in three to five minutes.
A weighted composite produces the Sightline Score, on a 0 to 100 scale where lower is better. It is our own clinical composite, built by ConciergeVet and informed by the published literature, not itself a validated instrument. The value is in the trajectory: one weekly score is a data point, but a series across months is a curve a vet can read at a glance. Because a single point can mislead, the number stays hidden until your third weekly check-in, once there is a baseline to read it against. Until then you see the trajectory and its band, not a figure to anchor on.
25%Mobility
20%Comfort and rest
15%Demeanour
13%Activity
13%Owner goals
8%Eating and drinking
3%Toileting
3%Grooming
These eight domains, and only these, produce the Sightline Score. The owner-goals domain tracks the activities you choose yourself, using the published CSOM method, so it is part of your Score rather than a separate test.
Mobility · an example item
How does your pet first stand up after a rest?
0 Springs up easily, no hesitation
1 Slight stiffness for a moment, then moves normally
2 Visibly stiff, takes a few steps to loosen up
3 Reluctant to stand, may shift weight or look uncomfortable
4 Struggles or needs help to stand
One of 44 items, surfaced when your pet's profile makes it relevant.
The trajectory
The signal is the direction.
Not a number to obsess over, but the movement over time, getting better, holding steady, or slipping. The Score runs 0 to 100, lower is better, and the trajectory across weeks matters more than any single point.
0 to 20 Excellent
21 to 40 Good
41 to 60 Watch
61 to 80 Concerning
81 to 100 Critical
Two ways people use Sightline
One score, two ways to use it.
Cohort one
Pain, recovery and treatment
For owners watching how their pet responds to treatment, or how a chronic condition is moving over time. The Score charts week-to-week change so a treatment effect, a flare-up, or a slow decline is visible against a real baseline rather than guessed at from memory.
After an operation: tracking recovery, surfacing setbacks early
Starting a new pain medication: tracking response over the first weeks
Arthritis or chronic pain: watching progression and treatment effect
Recurring conditions: catching shifts before they become worrying
Weekly check-in. Adaptive item set, 12 to 16 questions, three to five minutes.
Cohort two
Quality of life and end of life
For owners caring for a pet whose treatment is no longer about getting better, but about living well day to day. Sightline becomes a daily journal, with palliative-specific tools alongside the Score, and the option to share with family or a vet without an account.
Cancer or terminal illness: tracking comfort, good days vs hard days
Late-stage organ disease: watching for the signs to escalate
End-of-life decision support, with the independently validated JOURNEYS and HHHHHMM scales running separately alongside your Score
Hospice care at home: a shared journal for the people closest to your pet
Daily check-in. Comfort-focused subset, under two minutes. JOURNEYS weekly.
The Sightline Report
A page your vet can read in sixty seconds.
A short, dense PDF your vet can read in sixty seconds: the Sightline Score and trajectory, the per-domain breakdown that produced this week's number, the activities you chose to track, and your own cover note. Signed under MRCVS oversight, built to be read alongside your pet's clinical record, not in place of it.
When the question shifts from "will they get better" to "how are they today", Sightline becomes a daily journal you can share with the people who care. The Score and trajectory still anchor the page, but the cadence becomes daily and palliative-specific tools surface alongside. You can self-select this mode at onboarding, without waiting for a formal palliative-care conversation.
Daily Sightline Score, our own comfort-focused composite, in a short daily check-in
JOURNEYS, an independently validated quality-of-life scale by Dr Katie Hilst, weekly
Pawspice HHHHHMM, an independently validated scale by Dr Alice Villalobos, on demand
A trusted-person link, so family can follow without an account
Daily diary prompts for the small moments worth recording
Methodology and evidence
Evidence-led, and honest about its limits.
The Sightline Score is informed by published veterinary literature and aligned with WSAVA, AAHA, ISFM and AAFP guidance. It is a first-party clinical composite, not a validated instrument, so the signal is the trajectory, not the absolute number.
The methodology is published in full, and every score can be traced back to the version of the algorithm that produced it. The Score is withheld until a baseline exists, so the first weeks show the trajectory and band rather than a number to anchor on.
Validated instruments, used as published
Two different things sit behind Sightline. The Sightline Score above is our own composite. Separately, where they help, we bring in established clinical scales that have been independently validated and published by others, used as published and credited to their authors: the Feline Grimace Scale (FGS) for pain in cats, and the JOURNEYS and Pawspice HHHHHMM quality-of-life scales. They run on their own and report their own scores, and are not inputs to the Sightline Score.
