About

what is Ako?

Ako embraces the Māori philosophy that lives are made better when students and teachers learn from each other.  At AkoVet, we believe that everyone has something to learn and something to share that can improve the lives of animals and the people who care for them. 

Our Motivation

We know how stressful it can be when the animals under your care develop a medical or behavioural problem that impacts their welfare. Whether you are an owner or a veterinarian, you want to get to the bottom of what’s causing the problem quickly and choose the treatment option that will work best for your unique situation to get them back to feeling better as soon as possible.

We also know how difficult it is to make these kinds of decisions on your own. There is a lot of information out there to sort through and it’s constantly changing over time as new research comes out or as new interventions become available. You are often not sure what resources you can trust or how you can turn all that general advice into specific actions that will help your animals.

Our Mission

We’re a New Zealand based organisation on a mission to make it easy for animal owners, veterinary professionals, and technical experts to share their unique knowledge with each other so that we can provide better evidence-based care to the animals we care about.

We’re accomplishing this by co-designing interactive software tools that guide users through the process of (1) developing effective preventive care plans to minimise the risk of problems happening in the first place and (2) navigating the many diagnostic and treatment pathways to manage medical and behavioural problems when they do occur.

We are also commited to creating extension resources for animal owners and continuing professional development (CPD) modules for veterinary professionals to empower them with the knowledge to translate science into specific recommendations that will work for their unique situation.

Our Approach

Science doesn’t do the world much good unless the findings are actually applied in practice to improve animal care. Our approach to designing new resources and tools for making animal management decisions is guided by the three fundamental drivers of human behaviour change.

Customised Advice

Providing evidence-based recommendations that are specific and relevant for the unique situation.

Collaborative Relationships

Having animal owners and veterinary professionals work together to decide which options to choose and how to implement them.

Community Support

Creating a community of practice where people learn from and support each other in achieving positive change

Our Story

What would you do if you were three veterinarians sitting on a stack on information and resources that could make a positive difference in the lives of your patients, clients, and colleagues?

In our case, we decided to create an organisation that would allow us to share what we’ve learned from the many research, teaching, and industry-good initiatives we’ve been involved with in New Zealand over the past ten years.

Our Team

We are a team of veterinary researchers, educators, and clinicians whose careers have taken some interesting twists and turns since we first started out as practicing veterinarians.

Find out more about who we are and how we got here.

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Carolyn Gates

Co-Founder

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Kat Littlewood

Co-Founder

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Seton Butler

Co-Founder

Focus Areas

Evidence-Based Medicine

Designing, conducting, and reviewing research studies to fill in knowledge gaps around animal care.

Veterinary Education

Developing extension materials and self-directed learning modules for veterinary-related content.

Animal Welfare, Ethics, & Law

Evaluating frameworks for animal-based and management-based indicators of animal welfare.

Behaviour Change

Strengthening communication in the veterinary-client-patient relationship to achieve change.

Professional Standards

Navigating the legal and ethical standards for providing veterinary professional services.

Software Development

Building veterinary practice management software and mobile applications to support clinical care.

Our Expertise

We have award-winning and  internationally-recognised expertise across many different species and subject areas.

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Keen to Collaborate?

We love working with people who are as passionate about animals as we are. If we can help you bring a project idea to life, please don't hesitate to get in touch.

Our Funding

The initial funding to support the development and hosting of the Backyard Poultry resources was through a grant from the Sustainable Food and Fibre Futures (SFFF) fund with additional financial support from Carolyn’s 2022 Prime Minister’s Educator of the Year Award. One of the big challenges for us has been figuring out how to make this project financially viable long term so that we can continue to develop and offer these resources to the community after the initial funding has run out.

At present, we are preparing additional grant applications to start building out resources for the other major production, lifestyle, and companion animal species.

We are planning to develop commercial versions of the interactive software tools as well as different pricing models for our forthcoming online continuing professional development courses for veterinarians and veterinary nurses.  We are also exploring the possibility of ongoing sponsorship from industry and commercial organisations.

The reveune generated from any commercial activities will be invested back in other research and educational initiatives.

FAQ

If you have more questions about the work we’re doing, please don’t hesitate to get in touch through our Contact page.

AkoVet was registered as a New Zealand Limited Company (NZBN: 9429051507411, GST: 140-051-144-GST004) in August 2023.  Our main reason for doing this was to have a formal legal entity that we could use when applying for research grants and exploring other funding streams to support the ongoing costs of creating and maintaining the digital resources. 

We have worked on too many research projects in the past where the initiatives died off shortly after the initial funding ran out because there was no sustainable business model in place to carry on the work long-term. We wanted to make this time different by casting a commercial lens over the industry-good work. The work is not going to do industry much good unless there is a way to make it continue.

In the AkoVet Constitution, we have specified that the company has been established for charitable purposes. However, we have not yet formally registered as a charity because we still need to work through the potential implications and impacts on our ability to finance this work.

A key reason we launched AkoVet was because we found it was difficult for both animal owners and veterinarians to find the information they needed on existing websites and then turn it into an actionable plan for managing the issue they’re worried about.

  • Government and university extension websites tend to focus on issues important to animal agriculture or public health and are often written in very technical language that is not accessible to the general public.
  • Commercial pharmaceutical and retail company websites tend to focus on information that is relevant to the products they sell and miss out on other potential options for managing animal health issues
  • Industry organisation websites often present very general advice that’s difficult to apply to specific situations because they don’t want to take on the liability or responsibility for providing veterinary advice
  • Online encyclopedias tend to present information on a disease-by-disease basis, which is not very helpful unless you already have a diagnosis for the animal.
  • Blog-style websites tend to be unstructured collections of articles with “top five tips” and there is limited quality control over the accuracy of the information.

 

We wanted to take the approach of designing resources that are based on the types of questions people commonly ask (i.e. why is my dog vomiting?) and provided interactive, guided pathways to help reach a diagnosis and develop an actionable treatment plan. 

We also wanted to have a stronger focus on preventive care both in making sure people are aware of the commitments involved in taking care of animals and making sure that the animals are provided with the right conditions and care to prevent problems from happening in the first place.

VetMark is the software platform that will be powering the interactive decision-support tools and animal care pathways created through AkoVet.  We have set VetMark up as a separate New Zealand Limited Company (NZBN: 9429047608757) because it requires a different underlying business model and investment structure than AkoVet to support the more advanced IT development work. 

All the static extension content and educational modules will be hosted through the AkoVet website whereas as all the decision-support tools that require data storage and server processing time will be hosted through the VetMark platform.