Integrative Health Thinking and the One Health Concept: Is Social Work All for ‘One’ or ‘One’ for All?

Abstract

During the past 20 years, the three branches of medicine — human, veterinarian or other animal, and conservation — have undergone a significant shift towards greater integrative thinking about health and welfare. The global emergence of the concept of One Health has grown out of a number of sociopolitical, biomedical, and environmental pressures and influences, acting both internally on the theoretical limits of the health professions and disciplines, and externally on their relationships to one another and to their respective service sectors. Such myriad forces combine increasingly complex issues that traverse and merge the traditional boundaries of local and global terrains, resulting in far-reaching changes. Many of these global changes are fundamentally ‘concomitant with the increase in human population and its ramifications of rapid urbanisation, intensified livestock production, encroachment of ecosystems and globalised trade and traffic’ (Zinsstag, Schelling, Waltner-Toews, & Tanner, 2011, p. 149). In addition, increased knowledge about and risks of zoonotic diseases that mutually affect all animals, including humans, are challenging the traditional academic boundaries of the ‘helping’ professions, including social work.