A Vision for One Medicine One Science

The University of Minnesota works to create a consortium to advance the science behind One Health to address global grand challenges.

On April 29, 2018, the University of Minnesota held a half-day workshop to facilitate the creation of a consortium of like-minded partners who are committed to cooperating and leveraging our resources and projects to improve global health through One Medicine One Science. This effort hopes to establish a sustainable community of practitioners, researchers and their institutions that expands on the ideas and ideals of the iCOMOS conferences to advance the science behind One Health to address global grand challenges.

This consortium aims to be a cooperative structure that creates a diversity of cooperative ventures that advance One Medicine One Science. Of particular interest are approaches that marshal expertise and research resources to meet development goals and foster innovative and evidence-based solutions to health challenges.

What we hope to achieve moving forward:

• Fostering Interdisciplinary Collaborations — We hope to build a global community of institutions, foundations, scholars and policy-makers fostering interdisciplinary collaborations — across ‘science, practice and policy’ that creates a diversity of collaborative ventures advancing the science behind One Health to optimize the health of humans, animals and their ecosystems.
• Innovation — This consortium is not intended to be a monolithic structure but instead a cooperative entity advocating for approaches that will marshal expertise and research resources to meet development goals and foster innovative and evidence-based solutions to global health challenges.
• Facilitate Partnerships — COMOS can play a role at the individual, team, institutional and global level — facilitating collaboration, acting as liaisons between two countries that don’t normally talk.

Specific Objectives of this meeting were to:

• Establish shared goals for a One Medicine One Science Consortium for key stakeholders
• Identify core approaches for achieving shared goals
• Identify an initial short list of topics of interest to focus efforts
• Develop plan to launch consortium efforts

During the half-day event, Dr. Srirama Rao and Dr. Katey Pelican facilitated a diverse group of 36 partners from thirteen countries to establish shared goals for COMOS and identify core approaches for achieving those goals. Attendees from academia, national government agencies, intergovernmental organizations and non-profit organizations joined together to develop a plan to launch Consortium efforts. The highly interactive workshop used social science techniques to draw from the collective knowledge of the room and foster networking and partnership among national and international partners and across disciplines. Collectively, the participants identified shared topics and goals of interest, identified core approaches for achieving these shared goals that fill important niches in the ‘One Health, EcoHealth, Planetary Health’ realm and then created action plans for launching initial collaborative efforts for the consortium.

As groups worked, a number of key points were highlighted. First, while several key goals and topics were identified (e.g., AMR, environmental contamination, affordable healthcare globally, migration, food security and safety), the key discussion and priority was around how to support new approaches to promote more impactful work: Policy, economic impacts, multi-sectoral and multi-disciplinary approaches, aligning to international standards and efforts, and data governance all were highlighted. Trust was also highlighted as a key component both in terms of promoting a collaborative and transparent global consortium, but also to promote local trusted partners as key implementers of good work to meet country needs. Finally, the importance of aligning and synergizing the work of COMOS with other related initiatives and partners including those in the One Health, EcoHealth and Planetary Health realm. Ultimately, the specific outputs of the workshop will inform and guide launching the Consortium in the coming year.

Next Steps:

• Establish an International Steering Committee to support strategic direction
• Build networks: Connect high-level funding and decision makers before the conference, alignment between programs, intercountry coordinations, facilitate how countries should identify their own priorities to inform the consortium
• Initiate concrete pilot work to advance the consortium in the coming year based on recommendations.
• Establish a vision and value proposition for the Consortium for key stakeholders