Purpose of the ATCvet system

ATCvet is a system for the classification of substances intended for therapeutic use in veterinary medicine, and can serve as a tool for the classification of medicinal products.

The ATCvet system provides an administrative tool for putting groups of drugs into systems according to therapeutic categories. The aim is to:

• facilitate exchanges of data for pharmacovigilance studies;
• improve the comparability of statistics on sales of veterinary medicinal products;
• provide authors of scientific articles with a tool for identifying medicines; and
• help veterinary surgeons and pharmacists in their everyday work.

In manyEuropean countries, veterinary medicinal products are presented in accordance with the ATCvet system in drug catalogues, and the system is used as an administrative tool by the health authorities. Since many substances are used in both human and veterinary medicine, the possibility of linking the classification systems for the two areas is of considerable value. The ATCvet system is therefore being developed in close association with the ATC system.