One Health education should be early, inclusive, and holistic
As an advocate for system change to address health inequities, Virchow has been described as a pioneer of One Health: the idea that the health and wellbeing of human and animal populations and environmental systems are complex interconnected occurrences shaped by biosocial contexts.
Achieving the SDGs will require capacity building to elicit transdisciplinary knowledge integration combined with codesign and solution implementation at the local, national, regional, and global levels. Unfortunately, most training in One Health occurs within medical and veterinary programmes after at least 3 years or more of prerequisite study
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that, itself, promotes and rewards discipline-specific mental models. We argue that the development of proficiency in One Health thinking and methods is impeded by previous acculturation into such professional silos, and that bioscience focused One Health education tends to exclude students from other disciplines, undermining development of transdisciplinary approaches to address the SDGs.
University of Melbourne’s undergraduate students are required to study breadth subjects from outside their home faculty to develop a broader set of skills than those typically available within their field of study. The breadth topics are a special category of such subjects, designed for learning complementary ways of thinking about issues and problems, and challenging students’ perceptions.
A second-year course commenced in 2019 and integrates these concepts, within a system thinking framework, via extensive use of case studies.
The courses use collaborative, group-based active learning activities, including site visits and gallery-based tasks, to promote student exploration of the weekly One Health themes, supported by presentations from a diverse range of cross-disciplinary guest experts. Diverse and inclusive types of knowledge are integrated throughout the curriculum including Australian Indigenous knowledge, law, politics and government, economics and trade, and social science, as well as the traditional bioscientific approaches including epidemiology, microbiology, and ecology. Subject teachers are drawn from multiple professional, cultural, linguistic, age, gender, and First Nations backgrounds.
FigureThe early, inclusive, holistic One Health model of education
we highlight the benefits of the One Health model. The earlier One Health education is incorporated into a University curriculum, the more inclusive and diverse the cohort of students, given the absence of stiff disciplinary silos and mental models. Consequently, students are open to examine and learn holistic approaches to One Health problems. This approach results in an effective reinforcing cycle (R) in which newly formed transdisciplinary One Health thinkers permanently explore, assess, and incorporate diverse approaches into their problem-solving toolbox.
For example, we make explicit the strong linkages between One Health thinking and indigenous concepts of caring for the country,
and the fundamental importance of place-based and non-human kinship systems. In implementing this new model of One Health education, we also attract diverse and highly engaged students who enthusiastically confront One Health challenges.
the essence of the public and planetary level health challenges we face and the multifocal lenses needed to solve them: “For let us be perfectly clear, we are confronting the fundamental problem of attempting to understand those factors which have made us what we are, and which will determine our future. We have often referred to ‘the scientific method’, we now find that through applying it, we have moved from medicine into the social field, and in so doing, we have had to consider some of the fundamental issues of our times.”
We declare no competing interests.
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