About the award
Sponsored by New Zealand Food Safety, the AMR Award recognises an individual, team, or organisation who demonstrate best practice antimicrobial stewardship, infection prevention and control practices, or pioneering new and innovative approaches to reducing antibiotic use.
The first award was in 2025. It was to celebrate those making a real difference in reducing AMR risks in New Zealand. Highlighting their work recognises the positive impact they make.
The work to reduce AMR risks might include:
- spreading awareness about AMR
- preventing and controlling disease
- using strong biosecurity practices
- creating animal or plant health programmes to reduce the need for antibiotics
- promoting responsible antibiotic use
- reducing unnecessary antibiotic use.
Entries for the 2026 award closed on 27 September. The winner will be announced during World AMR Awareness Week (18 to 24 November). They will receive a certificate of recognition and a commemorative plaque.
Nominations and eligibility
Nominations were open to anyone working with or within the animal health or plant health sectors in New Zealand.
We wanted to hear about activities or practices that the nominees or applicants have put in place to help reduce antibiotic use and drivers for antibiotic use. This could have included awareness, infection prevention and control, antimicrobial stewardship, and monitoring and surveillance.
- AMR Awareness: Measures to educate prescribers and users of antibiotics about AMR and infection prevention and control measures, such as increased uptake of vaccinations and implementation of animal or plant health programmes
- Infection prevention and control: Effective and novel approaches to infection prevention and control, including implementation of biosecurity policies, animal health programmes and vaccine use.
- Antimicrobial stewardship: Demonstrate the development and use of guidelines, policies, and recommendations to improve judicious antibiotic use by prescribers and users.
- Monitoring and surveillance: Effective recording, monitoring and benchmarking of antimicrobial use, with review of trends and innovative ways to reduce antimicrobial use.
An individual, team or organisation could be nominated, and self-nominations were also accepted.
Previous award winners
In 2025, we congratulated Taranaki Veterinary Centre for concerted efforts to reduce antimicrobial resistance in cows under their care.
They are a leading example of the strong behaviour change in staff and clients that can be achieved when focussing on the whole ecosystem of antibiotic stewardship.
