By Equine MediRecord
Equine MediRecord was very happy to work with Tangent, Trinity’s Ideas Workspace – Trinity College Dublin business students to conduct market research looking at the Irish Equestrian industry and how horses’ health is tracked. The research saw 299 equestrian horse owners and trainers complete surveys to understand better how their horses’ health records are recorded.
The research found that 88% recorded their horses’ health records on paper with only 0.3% recording this information in a equine passport. The second largest method of recording health records was using Excel (5%) to keep the records digitally with little standardisation of these records. When further asked around the interest in having an online health record for their horses 81% said that this would definitely be of interest with 50% saying they would be willing to pay for such a service.
Given the discussions around improving transparency and equine welfare in the industry, it would seem that the very easy first step would be having a digital health tracking system for horses that can be easily accessed by those responsible looking after the horse’s welfare. This has been Equine MediRecord’s mission for the past five years. It is great to see that the desire for such a change was clearly evident in the research that was conducted by Trinity College’s Tangent business students.
A big thank you to our research team Sarah, Connor, Ruth, Emilia and Simon for their great work. It was lovely to work with them on this project.
