One Health encompasses the relationship between human health, animal health, and the health of the environment and holds that these entities are inextricably linked to the extent that none can be optimal unless they are all optimal. One Health is interdisciplinary and inclusive; it invites the full participation of community members working together with scientists, health practitioners, tribal leaders, and government agency personnel to identify problems and create realistic sustainable solutions to those problems. This program will provide knowledge and problem-solving skills for individuals who will be involved in managing One Health challenges at the community, state, federal, and international level. Implementing a constructionist approach and using the knowledge and skills developed in the coursework, the program culminates in the creation of a management plan to address a problem that students and community members have identified. The plan will be presented to stakeholders and content experts in a public forum.
Understanding and Operationalizing One Health
University of Alaska Fairbanks via edX Professional Certificate
Overview
Syllabus
Course 1: One Health: A Ten-Thousand-Year-Old View into the Future
Learn to see the connections between human, animal, and environmental. Understanding these connections allows us to approach challenges in a holistic and constructionist approach and address problems at their root causes rather than treating their outcomes.
Course 2: Pathways to Exploring and Understanding One Health Connections
This course will present several “Wicked Problems” and explore them from a One Health approach. This process will help students see how using a multi-disciplinary, cross cultural approach to understanding the root causes of these issues supports a construction of resilient and sustainable solutions.
Course 3: Approaches to Operationalizing One Health
Learn how to put One Health into practice. While One Health is broadly accepted as an approach to understanding issues at the interface of human, animal, and environmental health, its interdisciplinary nature can make operationalizing the approach challenging. Students will learn how to use several tools in a community-based participatory approach to build solutions from the bottom up. Such an approach improves the likelihood of sustainable success and it engages the support and priorities of the communities involved at every step.
Courses
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One Health is internationally recognized as a strategy to understand and address many of the wicked problems facing the world today. Organizations such as the World Health Organization, the United Nations, and the Arctic Council have endorsed this approach. While many experts agree that working across disciplines and cultures at the interface of human, animal and environmental health provides a simultaneously deep and broad knowledge base, achieving the collaboration required for this work to succeed is often very challenging. The effective operationalization of One Health requires skills and approaches that support equity of knowledge transfer giving equal weight to natural sciences, social sciences and traditional ways of knowing. While knowledge holders are often well- versed in understanding information and communicating it to others within their own discipline and knowledge base, they often struggle to understand data as it is presented from knowledge bases and disciplines outside their own. Competence in active listening skills, cultural awareness, and guidelines that promote equity in the value of all knowledge systems engaged are key to the successful implementation of a One Health approach. This course will build on the skills acquired in OH1x. In OH2x students will work through actual case studies where problems will be examined, defined, and addressed using a community-based participatory One Health approach. Students will gain experience in
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Active listening
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Cultural awareness
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Knowledge Holder and stakeholder identification
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Defining primary and secondary problems
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Building and maintaining community relationships and trust
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Assessing the success of implementation plans
This course will prepare students for OH3x where they will learn about and use skills and tool kits to help them understand and develop implementation plans for One Health issues they are experiencing in their communities and or in the communities where they work.
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One Health is well accepted as an approach to understand issues at the interface of human, animal, and environmental health. This work requires cross cultural and interdisciplinary collaborative efforts that utilize several strategies while prioritizing community involvement. With this approach a broad and simultaneously deep knowledge base can be developed. Such a constructionist approach to problem solving can support tremendous understanding of problems at their root causes, but this process is often associated with challenges that make operationalizing One Health difficult. In this course students will learn what toolkits are available and widely used, their strengths and shortcomings, and how to implement them to put One Health concepts into practice.
Five different tools will be described and practiced to enhance the approach, understanding, and implementation of each platform. Each of these tools will be reviewed and discussed in how they are used from a community-based participatory approach.
By the end of this course students will have the opportunity to apply what they have learned through all three One Health courses by choosing an issue that they themselves have seen or experienced. They will create their own personalized portfolio that will allow them to apply their understanding of One Health, and utilize the skills and toolkits attained to build a sustainable mitigation plan.
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Are you interested in understanding how global climate change will alter human society, animal health, and the environment? Are you curious about how these three things are interconnected?
This course focuses on what is happening right now in the Arctic, where climate change is accelerating twice as fast as the rest of the world. Understanding how Arctic ecosystems are adapting and collapsing can give us insight into future changes across the globe. While this course is focused on the Arctic, the principles and concepts in this course can be applied anywhere in the world.
Finding deep solutions to new challenges caused by climate change can’t be accomplished using only traditional fields of science, such as medicine or biology.
Addressing these issues effectively requires a novel approach, one that integrates knowledge across disciplines and cultures and recognizes the interdependence of human, animal, and environmental health. This concept, always central to the Indigenous worldview, has recently been recognized in Western science as One Health.
One Health was originally developed as a means of understanding how zoonotic diseases, such as the recent COVID-19 pandemic, arise.
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Between 65% and 70% of emerging diseases in humans are of zoonotic origin. The way we impact our environment and how this influences human-animal interactions play a significant role in how these diseases develop and spread.
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Health is more than the absence of disease and can be defined as a state of well-being for individuals and their communities. Under this definition, well-being encompasses physical, mental, behavioral, cultural, and spiritual health.
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Applying this holistic approach to the One Health paradigm allows us to bring in expertise across natural and social sciences and connect Western science with traditional Indigenous ways of knowing.
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Such a broad and deep integration of knowledge and experience provides opportunities for understanding large issues like food safety, security, and sovereignty at their roots, and for engaging stakeholders to build effective solutions.
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Taught by
Hannah Robinson, Kelsey Nicholson, Arleigh Reynolds, Laurie Meythaler-Mullins and Tuula Hollmen
