Teaching One Health: Animal husbandry in a post-graduate interdisciplinary curriculum

Abstract

Background and Aim: This work presents the implementation of a course on animal husbandry in an interdisciplinary curriculum based on the One Health concept. The study describes learners' viewpoints about the course and its insertion in the curriculum. The study aimed at identifying avenues for improvement. Materials and Methods: Fourteen learners (health professionals) participated to individual semi-structured interviews lasting for 25-35 min each. Learners' opinions were extracted from the transcribed interviews and analysis themes were identified from recurrent narratives. Results: The learners perceived animal husbandry as relevant for One Health and potentially useful for their future practice. More precisely, learners were considering a future use of the newly acquired knowledge and skills in the advising of communities facing malnutrition and for the strategic planning at wider levels. Teaching methods were appreciated thanks to the active learning style. Unmet expectations concerned the coverage of impacts and relationships to other disciplines, the inclusion of viewpoints from other disciplines into the teaching, and the degree of contextualization of contents, e.g. through case studies. Accordingly, the main avenues for improvement, as identified by learners, were to give a prior focus on impacts (especially on human health) for all contents and to increase the number of case studies, but also to better address the questions of the usefulness of animal products in the management of malnutrition. Conclusion: The analysis of learners' expectations (met and unmet) and their recommendations regarding the future of the course helped identifying both successes and important challenges for teachers. Two main challenges are highlighted. First, increased interdisciplinarity is needed within the course to better cover the notion of impact of animal husbandry on health, society and environment. Second, the complexity of the domain under consideration will call for important efforts of clarification of the course structure and objectives in terms of skills acquisition.