Evaluating One Health initiatives – principles, criteria and indicators
Contact Person: John Berezowski
Duration: 2017 - 2018
Recent outbreaks of infectious disease (e.g. Q-fever, Ebola, MERS), but also obesity, climate change and food insecurity call for an integrated approach to human, animal and environmental health. One Health (OH) integrates transdisciplinarity and systemic thinking, and aims at creating synergies and reducing trade-offs. Although OH promises better solutions than the classic disciplinary approaches, methods and benchmarks for its evaluation are missing. The COST Action “Network for Evaluation of OH” (NEOH) is developing such a framework. This requires the adaptation of methods from many fields that do not belong to the classical health disciplines such as education, collective learning processes, data management, network science, knowledge governance, etc. This project will review existing methods from these fields for applicability to the NEOH framework and identify existing methodological gaps. In a second step the metrics and indicators are tested on a set of case studies in OH surveillance in collaboration with the International Society for Disease Surveillance (ISDS). The applicability and usefulness of the methods are assessed, and the methods are modified in an interative process. Finally, the updated framework is validated on a second set of ISDS case studies. To test its suitability for OH policy initiatives, it is applied to the current Swiss governmental strategy for antimicrobial resistances (StAR). Results will feed into improving the current NEOH framework.
