So, he's now fully recovered and bounding around like nothing ever happened.
Can't say it was an easy couple of months, but on the whole he dealt with it much better than we expected.
We use a small very local vet who have always been fine. One of the kids works for a larger vet a few miles away and had mentioned the excellent results they'd had from Phovia, a light therapy that accelerates healing. We mentioned that to our vet who scoffed at the idea, so we took him to the other practice where he had the Phovia and you could see visible improvements every couple of days when he had his bandages changed. I guess the moral of this rambling is to challenge when you're not happy with what you're hearing.