Quality assessment of fish vaccine data in the Norwegian Veterinary Prescription Register (VetReg)

Abstract

Background Vaccination of farmed salmonids has been an integral part of preventing infectious diseases in Norway’s aquaculture industry. The Norwegian government regulates the use of vaccines and there is a need to monitor vaccine usage for both regulatory and research purposes, at local and national scales. The Norwegian Veterinary Prescription Register (VetReg) is a national database that includes all prescriptions of medicines to animals dispensed by pharmacies and all medicines used for food producing animals by veterinarians. The purpose of our study was to evaluate the quality of fish vaccination data reported to VetReg in 2016–2022. We considered the following attributes: completeness, validity, and timeliness. For external validation, we compared the data in VetReg to wholesaler statistics. Results Pharmacies reported fish vaccines to VetReg in a variety of quantity units, including doses and volumes, which required us to harmonize the data to a single unit. Harmonization was not possible for nine percent of the records, which were mainly bath vaccines reported in doses. We identified specific issues that required manual editing of the units of 1 percent of the records. After exclusions, we validated individual variables such as product codes and location identifiers using external registers. Some variables, such as the ‘number of animals’, were inconsistent for 31 percent of the records. The coverage of vaccine data in VetReg ranged from 81 to 113 percent for the ten most sold vaccines in 2020–2022 as compared to wholesales statistics. For the timeliness, we found that 75 percent of the records were submitted within 25 days for all years. Conclusions Overall, we found that the fish vaccination data in VetReg was of sufficient quality to monitor injectable vaccine usage at hatcheries after 2020. We identified issues at the product level, with bath vaccines, and with single variables (number of animals, weight, and species). We recommend that quality can be improved by reporting all vaccines in volume rather than doses, reporting a single vaccine prescription per report, and including a deadline for pharmacies to report in the legislation.