Opportunities and Challenges for Inter‐Professional One Health Education

Abstract

One Health is an interdisciplinary approach to optimizing health for humans, animals, and the environment at the local, national, and global level. It incorporates expertise from diverse fields—including human and veterinary medicine, environmental and biological sciences, engineering, public health, political science, urban planning, economics, sociology, epidemiology, and statistical modeling—to study and solve important challenges at the intersection of humans, animals, and the environment.While it is quite easy to get buy‐in from the various stakeholders in One Health, there are many barriers to incorporating inter‐professional education in this area. For example, many undergraduate institutions do not have public health, health profession, and engineering schools. Even universities like Tufts, which has these schools, face significant obstacles in integrating One Health into their curricula.Specific suggestions for overcoming these obstacles will be provided, including seed grant initiatives and mini‐symposia, along with a description of a highly successful inter‐professional One Health activity currently ongoing at our institution: a student‐driven, faculty coordinated “Comparative Anatomy Exchange Day”. This activity involves veterinary, medical, dental, physician assistant, and graduate students.The event is hosted at the medical school, which has a newly‐built Gross Anatomy laboratory. Since human anatomy labs have tables sized for humans, it is not possible to accommodate large animal cadavers. Thus, the focus is on a specific organ system such as the GI system. The vet students bring GI systems from large animals, including horses, cows, camelids, etc; smaller animal cadavers such as birds, cats, dogs, pigs, and sheep are also provided. The medical school provides 1–2 previously dissected cadavers that are especially good for illustrating the GI system.The morning session is devoted to students from the various professional schools presenting the GI system of the human and animal species via a series of short, pithy talks. Following lunch, all of the participants head to the Gross Anatomy laboratory where the human and animal cadavers are displayed. Students go from station to station as they wish. A student is in charge of describing the relevant anatomy at each station, with a small number of faculty available for questions.This activity has proven to be highly popular, despite the fact that it is an optional activity offered on a Saturday afternoon in late April—more than 130 students and faculty participated. Creating One Health activities that are fun, educational, and allow students from different professions to interact is a highly effective way to provide inter‐professional education around One Health.This abstract is from the Experimental Biology 2019 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this abstract published in The FASEB Journal.