VetReg was established for farmed fish in 2011 and for terrestrial animals in 2012. The VetReg database is owned by the Norwegian Food Safety Authority. Reporting to VetReg is mandatory by legislation and applies to veterinarians, pharmacies and feed mills. Veterinarians and feed mills are required to report all prescriptions for food producing animal species (including horses). Reporting prescriptions for companion and fur animals to VetReg is voluntary. Pharmacies are obligated to report all dispensed prescriptions, including those for use in the veterinarians’ own practice. 

Animal subcategories: Data are collected at individual animal level for dairy cattle and at herd level for other food producing animals. For farmed fish also production stage has to be reported.

Input: The veterinarians report their antibiotic usage in amounts (ml, g etc.) of antimicrobial veterinary medicinal product (VMP) administered to the animal or handed out to the farmer, the pharmacies report number of packages of antibiotic VMP dispensed to animal owners, and the feed mills reports amounts (kg) antibiotics prescribed. In Norway, feed mills only dispense medicated feed for use in farmed fish. As pharmacies report all antibiotic VMPs sold to veterinarians to VetReg, this allows for assessing if the veterinarians are compliant with the legal requirement of reporting to VetReg. Farmers have no role in the data collection for VetReg.                     

Unit of measurement (numerator) to express the usage is currently mg but it is planned to also use DDDvet and DCDvet values from EMA[1].

Indicator for benchmarking has not yet been decided on and thus benchmarking has not yet been implemented as a tool for antibiotic stewardship.