Putting One Health into Practice (POPH90310)

'One Health' is an integrated approach aiming to balance and optimise the health of people, animals, and ecosystems sustainably. It acknowledges the interdependence of human, animal, plant, and environmental health. One Health approaches are increasingly called on to address pressing public health challenges including emerging infectious diseases, pandemics, endemic zoonoses, food safety, food security, nutritional and environmental determinants of health, and health sustainability and equity amidst the escalating impacts of climate change. 

Despite increasing demand for One Health approaches, few practitioners are currently equipped with the skills to translate One Health from aspiration to practical application. Putting One Health Into Practice unpacks the objectives of One Health, and different methods for operationalising or implementing it for action and impact. Using a suite of topical local and international case studies, students are introduced to a One Health operationalisation framework – a series of steps that can be applied to a specific issue to create a One Health action plan to sustainably address that issue. The subject builds on students’ existing educational and professional experiences so that they can contribute to One Health teams, and work across sectors and disciplines in a range of professional settings in the future. Upon completing the subject, students will be well-positioned to help develop and implement effective One Health actions to address critical cross-sectoral issues of our time.

The subject is delivered over a six-week block, with students learning to use the phased steps of the One Health operationalisation framework throughout that time. Case studies are used longitudinally across the subject to illustrate key technical and procedural concepts, allowing for progression and depth over time in development of ideas and understanding, while also representing breadth across international and domestic, urban and rural, and high and low resource settings. The assessment is centred around students being supported to develop their own operationalisation plan for a specific One Health issue. There is one all-day field trip to examine a real-world One Health issue, with remote students supported to undertake their own One Health field trip or stakeholder engagement locally.