WHAT IS A
VETERINARY PROFESSIONAL?

What is a professional?

A professional is qualified, broadly skilled, and engaged in their profession as their occupation. Professionals are responsible for their own continuing education and professional registration, and they carry significant autonomy and responsibility in their work. Professionalism usually involves a professional body that advocates for the profession and promotes high standards, alongside a regulatory framework that holds practitioners to those standards.

Veterinary nurses, technicians, and technologists are professionals. Each holds a formal qualification, practises within agreed standards, and carries accountability for their own professional conduct.

In New Zealand, veterinarians are the only members of the veterinary team with legislated regulation. Veterinary nurses, technicians, and technologists are regulated voluntarily through AVPRC, with professional representation through NZVNA. See About Regulation to read more about regulation vs representation.

Why we say "practitioner"

The word practitioner matters, and we use it deliberately. A practitioner is someone who practises: who assesses, decides, and acts within their own competence, and who is accountable for their own work. It describes what a person does, where "professional" describes their standing and obligations. Veterinary nurses, technicians, technologists, and allied veterinary practitioners are all practitioners in this sense. Their daily work involves clinical judgement and initiating care within their competence. That is a description of practice as it actually happens in clinics across New Zealand, whatever gaps remain in the legislation and whatever labels other documents use.

What is a paraprofessional?

A paraprofessional is trained to assist professionals, working in a supportive role and carrying out tasks delegated to them by veterinary nurses, technicians, or veterinarians. A formal qualification is usually not required, and there is usually no requirement for continuing education or registration, although we recommend both for effectiveness and job satisfaction.

Animal healthcare assistants are paraprofessionals, and the term describes their role accurately and respectfully: they work under delegated authority, and the professional who delegates remains responsible for the decision to delegate.

The term is sometimes applied to veterinary nurses and technicians, and there it does not fit. A paraprofessional, by definition, works under delegated authority only, without initiable tasks or independent decision-making. Veterinary nurses, technicians, and technologists exercise clinical judgement and initiate care within their competence every working day. Describing a qualified, registered practitioner as a paraprofessional describes the legislation's current silence rather than the work itself.

What does "allied veterinary professional" mean?

Allied veterinary professional (AVP) is a term we created in 2014 to describe the perimeter of this registration scheme. The register serves two groups. The first is the veterinary nursing and technology professions: veterinary nurses, veterinary technicians, and veterinary technologists. The second is allied veterinary practitioners with a focused scope of practice, following the naming convention familiar from human healthcare, where allied health describes roles such as radiographers and physiotherapists alongside doctors and nurses. In our register, this group is currently mostly veterinary physiotherapists and some rural workers as well. We combined "allied" and "professional" so that one organisation, and one term, could cover both groups.

AVP was never intended as an identity. Veterinary nurses are veterinary nurses. Veterinary technicians are veterinary technicians. Veterinary technologists are veterinary technologists. Veterinary physiotherapists are veterinary physiotherapists. Each profession keeps its own name, its own qualification, and its own identity, and the AVP term should not be used to fold them together. It answers one question only: who does this scheme cover?

The term has since travelled. It now appears in regulatory documents internationally, sometimes with meanings different from ours. Wherever you encounter it, it is worth checking which professions the document using it actually includes, because the answer varies. On this website, AVP means exactly what is described above.

What is the difference between these roles?

See Roles and Responsibilities for information on how the various roles differ in the animal healthcare team.