The DermNet New Zealand Trust is incorporated by New Zealand Companies Office, Certificate of Incorporation number 2591483. It is a registered charity, Registration Number CC50036. The affairs of the DermNet New Zealand Trust are run by its Trustees.

Do you love DermNet NZ? Please consider making a donation.

Supported by the New Zealand Dermatological Society (NZDS), DermNet New Zealand was conceived by Dr Amanda Oakley and a small team of New Zealand dermatologists at the Annual Scientific Meeting of the Society in 1995.

In a world where Wikipedia and Google hadn’t yet been invented, the doctors pooled their resources to provide a completely free and trustworthy online dermatological library certified by Health on the Net.

In 1996, a summer student was employed to upload information sheets written for patients by DermNet's inaugural Chairperson, Dr Mark Duffill, and to scan hundreds of transparency slides. Over time, it became clear that DermNet NZ should also focus on health professionals, researchers and students looking for up-to-date summaries about skin conditions and treatments. 

DermNet New Zealand is a Charitable Trust established in 2013 and led by a Board of Trustees. Its website is the world's most popular dermatology resource, loved by dermatologists, primary care physicians, students and patients. Every day, the website hosts up to 80,000 visitors asking, What’s this rash? and How do I treat it? Google provides translations in over a hundred languages. Our thousands of clinical images appear worldwide in presentations, journal articles, posters, smartphone apps, websites and blogs. 

DermNet NZ has more than 2,500 topic pages and 25,000 clinical and dermatopathology images. More than 100 new topics and 500 clinical images are added every year. 

All pages are written and reviewed by dermatologists, other health professionals, medical writers and students. Many writers are based in New Zealand, but others have contributed from UK, USA, Canada, Australia, Mexico, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and elsewhere. 

In mid-2016 the website was completely redeveloped by Room9 to provide a mobile responsive, content-management driven, optimised platform, using SilverStripe. This makes the editorial team's work easier, with a responsive system to please our mobile readers (and Google's algorithms). Technical development of DermNet NZ is now supported by Auckland creative digital agency, TOAST.

Social media has been enhanced on Twitter and Facebook, with the help of New Zealand dermatologist, Dr Victoria Scott-Lang. In 2019 we launched DermNetNZ's Instagram.

In 2020, we added DermDiag, an algorithm to diagnose skin conditions provided to DermNet by Dr Richard Ashton, UK Dermatologist.

Today, DermNet NZ has a part-time staff of 6, and regular contributors to content. The website is heavily reliant on volunteers to write up-to-date pages; and on corporate supporters to fund website hosting, development, writers, and editors. 

Volunteers and sponsors help to keep DermNet free and accessible by anyone with an internet connection. Do you want to help? 

Watch the history of DermNet NZ

Dr Amanda Oakley presents The History Of DermNet NZ at The International Society Of Teledermatology. In this presentation, Dr Amanda Oakley talks about her incredible journey with DermNet NZ and how it started at a time before Google and Youtube existed –

Video: Video History of DermNet NZ 

DermNet has been certificated by Health on the Net annually since 1996.

It has received awards from TUANZ (2000), Experian Hitwise (2004–2010), SheEO (2018), International Alliance of Dermatology Patients award (2016)  Its ideas for enhancing dermatological diagnoses using artificial intelligence resulted in winning the Ministry of Health's Clinicians Challenge in 2017.

Awards to Amanda Oakley for her work on DermNet New Zealand

Dr Amanda Oakley, DermNet's founder, was honoured on Queen's Birthday in June 2018 by being appointed by Her Majesty The Queen as a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit in recognition of her services and contribution to Dermatology.

Other awards

• 2012 Honorary International Membership of the American Dermatological Association and Honorary Membership of the American Academy of Dermatology
• 2014 Honorary Membership of Indian Society of Teledermatology
• 2015 International Pioneer Award of Women's Dermatologic Society and Honorary Membership of MelNet New Zealand
• 2016 Honorary Membership of Skin Cancer College of Australasia
• 2017 Lifetime Service in the Charitable Sector Award, a finalist in two categories the New Zealand Woman of Influence award, University of Auckland Dennis Pickup Clinical Educator award
• 2018 Excellence Award for Exceptional Services to Dermatology from the New Zealand Dermatological Society, the Peter Rothwell Clinical Teacher Award from the University of Auckland, Honorary Fellowship of the Royal New Zealand College of General Practitioners.
• 2019 American Academy of Dermatology Presidential Citation Award, University of Waikato Kudos Lifetime Achievement in Science award.

So what's next? Watch out for:

• A dermatoscopy atlas
• An online image shop, to streamline purchases of thousands of unwatermarked clinical images at various resolutions.

Sadly, developing the site costs money. You may see from time-to-time donation drives—please give generously—and we'll be expanding our advertising portfolio. 

DermNet NZ aims:                                                      

• To provide authoritative information about the skin
• To have all content written or reviewed by dermatologists
• To record dates of authorship and updates 
• To be readily accessible and easy to navigate
• To include low-resolution images for fast downloads
• To use uniform formatting throughout the site
• To minimise internal and external link errors and any other miscoding
• To write in plain English to accommodate a variety of health literacy levels
• For its search facility to access the entire site (Google Custom Search)
• To comply with the recommendations of:
  • Criteria for Assessing the Quality of Health Information on the Internet, 1997
  • eHealth Code of Ethics, 2000
  • Health on the Net's Code of Conduct.

We use a British English dictionary. Often, we add American spelling to keywords and phrases for clarity. We have a glossary of medical and dermatological terms accessible on every page as a mouseover tooltip.

Despite the best of intentions, we may include content that is incorrect, out of date, or inappropriate for the individual concerned. Our information should not be used to replace consultation with a dermatologist or other experienced health provider. We use Google's translation service to broaden access to non-English readers, but we are conscious that it's not always accurate.

For in-depth information about individual skin diseases, refer to Medscape Reference Dermatology Articles or one of the major dermatological textbooks.

DermNet NZ is funded by donations, advertising, commercial sponsorship and image licensing.

DermNet NZ may access content from other organisations, when these are consistent with our editorial policy. Our major partners are:

• Waikato District Health Board
• New Zealand Dermatological Society

For more about our partners and commercial sponsors and advertisers, visit our sponsors’ page. Or consider becoming a sponsor.

Images have been supplied by Assoc Prof Amanda Oakley, Waikato District Health Board, Dr Professor Raimo Suhonen (Finland), Dr Richard Ashton (UK), members of the NZDSI, or as otherwise noted.

Contact us if you would like to donate images.