This month marked the wrap up of the second One Health course offered at the University of Washington. It is a joint undergraduate and graduate course, and almost 40 students enrolled this spring. Splitting the class into teams of 5-6 persons, we worked through weekly clinical problem solving cases, some of which were based on the One Health cases developed by the American Association of Veterinary Medical Colleges (AAVMC) in collaboration with the Association for Prevention Teaching and Research (APTR) and the Healthy People Curriculum Task Force (HPCTF) see http://www.aavmc.org/one-health/case-studies.aspx. The themes of cases that students worked through included zoonotic diseases, conservation medicine, animals as sentinels, and the human animal bond. For each problem, the undergraduates took turns specializing in a human health, animal health, or environmental health perspective. The graduate students, leading the problem solving groups, were responsible for developing plans for integrated assessment and resolution of the problem, using systems approaches to the complex web of factors. It was heartening to see how naturally the students gravitated to this type of collaborative problem solving, as well as the creativity of the solutions they proposed!
