A Blueprint to Evaluate One Health

TLDR

One Health positions health professionals as agents for change and offers a platform to manage health determinants that are often missed by medicine or public health alone, yet its transdisciplinary nature demands significant effort due to societal and sectoral structures. There is a need to provide evidence on the added value of One Health for governments, researchers, funding bodies, and stakeholders. The authors developed a conceptual framework during a Network for Evaluation of One Health workshop, systematically describing One Health aspects, drivers, operations, and required infrastructures to enable measurement and monitoring of interdisciplinary integration. The framework identifies One Health outcomes—sustainability, health and welfare, interspecies equity and stewardship, effectiveness, and efficiency—that cannot be achieved through sectoral approaches alone and aligns them with sustainable development goals.

Abstract

One Health (OH) positions health professionals as agents for change and provides a platform to manage determinants of health that are often not comprehensively captured in medicine or public health alone. However, due to the organization of societies and disciplines, and the sectoral allocation of resources, the development of transdisciplinary approaches requires effort and perseverance. Therefore, there is a need to provide evidence on the added value of OH for governments, researchers, funding bodies, and stakeholders. This paper outlines a conceptual framework of what OH approaches can encompass and the added values they can provide. The framework was developed during a workshop conducted by the "Network for Evaluation of One Health," an Action funded by the European Cooperation in Science and Technology. By systematically describing the various aspects of OH, we provide the basis for measuring and monitoring the integration of disciplines, sectors, and stakeholders in health initiatives. The framework identifies the social, economic, and environmental drivers leading to integrated approaches to health and illustrates how these evoke characteristic OH operations, i.e., thinking, planning, and working, and require supporting infrastructures to allow learning, sharing, and systemic organization. It also describes the OH outcomes (i.e., sustainability, health and welfare, interspecies equity and stewardship, effectiveness, and efficiency), which are not possible to obtain through sectoral approaches alone, and their alignment with aspects of sustainable development based on society, environment, and economy.