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.onehealthglobal.net) was established to develop a framework for evaluating One Health Initiatives. The Section of Epidemiology took a leading role in this network, 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 in the three pillars of sustainability: society, environment and economy.

Framework published as Open Access Book

NEOH has published the evaluation framework 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.

At the Vetsuisse Faculty we offer an undergraduate elective course on One Health.

We also provide workshops in system thinking and One Health evaluation on demand for various institutions. For further information please send us an e-mail.