Scanning educational opportunities to confront grand challenges in animal health

Abstract

This exploratory study scanned North American opportunities for animal health trainees to gain skills and knowledge to confront grand challenges in animal health such as climate change, pandemics and biodiversity loss. Most programs turned to One Health when describing how their programs would prepare their graduates. When we reviewed One Health Masters level training, we little no consistency in the training opportunities between program. Where consistency was found, it was in traditional biomedical topics such as biostatistics and epidemiology. These findings agree with others who have concluded that One Health training may not provide sufficient training to advance agents of change capable of dealing with the complexity, ambiguity and volatility of grand challenges in animal health. Our early finding suggest there is a high degree of variability in the resulting skills, knowledge and attitudes of graduates from North American Masters level training in One Health. Our findings suggest a paradox of the proffering by academic institutions that One Health is their means to create future-ready animal health professionals while at the same time finding a significant emphasis on transmitting conventional disciplinary information similar to what can be found in population health and public health training. This study was limited in scope, thus leaving only as a hypothesis generating project.