One Health

One Health "is the integrated effort of multiple disciplines — working locally, nationally, and globally — to attain optimal health for people, animals and the environment", according to the American Veterinary Medical Association. This requires participatory approaches to identifying and addressing health problems. More fundamentally, the One Health approach shifts reductionist thinking towards systems thinking and thus demands also science to reassess their methods and paradigms. The Section of Epidemiology contributes to this change of paradigm by developing new methods and tools for a systemic approach to health.

The Network for Evaluation of One Health (NEOH) was established to develop a framework for evaluating One Health Initiatives. The Section of Epidemiology took a leading role in this COST Action, in collaboration with the Human and Animal Health Unit of the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Instituteand the Veterinary Epidemiology, Economics and Public Health Group of the Royal Veterinary College in London. A first result of the network was identifying the characteristics of One Health that were useful for evaluation. Interestingly, One Health shares many features with approaches to climate change and clean energy, similarly complex endeavors, and is ultimately expected to result in improved outcomes. As a next step, the evaluation framework was published as Open Access eBook that can also be printed on demand: Integrated approaches to health - a handbook for evaluation of One Health, at Wageningen Academic Publishers.

The NEOH network has been perpetuated as a community of practice calledNetwork for Ecohealth and One Health and keeps producing resources for the practice according to the One Health principles. The latest are an article on the core competencies required for One Health and a text book on Principles of One Health for a better planet.

Interested practitioners and scientists are welcome to join this community of practice which holds monthly online meetings.

The main One Health teaching in Zurich is covered by the One Health Institute.

We have developed a serious game tipping point which allows teaching the dynamics of complex adaptive systems in an imersive way. We facilitate the game in different contexts in which system thinking and complexity sciences are relevant.

We provide workshops in system thinking and One Health evaluation on demand for various institutions, such as the Swiss School for Public Health, the CAS One Health at the University of Bern or the advanced Master in Integrated Health Risk Management at the University of Liège.

For further inquieries please send us an e-mail.