The One Health concept recognizes health connections between humans, animals, and their shared environments. It promotes professional cooperation between physicians, veterinarians, and others to address complex problems affecting multiple species and pathogens in changing environments.
Today's collaborations across fields of health and wellness are insufficient to meet societies' challenges in combating disease and maintaining the ecosystem and public health. For example, researchers have previously found that in the realm of infectious diseases, there is a dearth of communication between veterinary and medical professionals, which, with the recent spread of various infectious diseases such as COVID-19, is necessary to track and respond to zoonotic threats. This problem is worsened by the isolation of the training and education within each profession, as well as the lack of zoonotic disease training and lack of environmental health information in human medicine curricula. Therefore, collaboration is essential to equip future physicians in the skills necessary to collaboratively solve complex societal problems including climate change, toxic waste, water pollution, food safety and security, and more.
While many medical educators may not yet be familiar with the concept, the One Health approach has been endorsed by a number of major medical and public health organizations and is beginning to be implemented in a number of medical schools including Harvard Medical School and the University of Washington Medical School. Currently, outside of a single lecture during the Health and Society Curriculum, there is no specific emphasis on One Health throughout the Plains year curriculum.
The proposed elective aims to use an innovative approach to allow our students to provide improved patient care in the context of One Health and to promote healthy environments benefiting all species.
