Problem identification and stakeholder engagement

Identifying the problem

When identifying the problem to be addressed by an IR project, researchers should consider societal, animal and environmental factors that could impact the effectiveness of a given health intervention. As discussed in the previous section, framing research problems using a broader One Health lens enables researchers to investigate influences beyond the health sector.

The OHHLEP theory of change identifies a series of societal, animal and environmental challenges that originate from human activity.¹ This list (see Table 1) can be used to inform problem identification in a One Health context. To successfully adopt a One Health approach to IR, reasearchers must draw from each column to ensure the study covers human, animal and environmental health, and the intersections between each domain.⁷

Assembling a multidisciplinary team

IR is a collaborative form of research, bringing together a broad range of skills and backgrounds to address implementation challenges. As outlined in previous modules, the IR team should include policy-makers and health care providers. When applying a One Health lens to IR, the study team should draw from a widened range of experts to represent the diversity of topics covered.

The list of experts involved in a One Health/IR team could also include the following:

epidemiologists
veterinarians
ecologists
urban planners
structural and environmental engineers
geologists
hydrologists
climatologists
geospatial scientists
botanists
parasitologists
and microbiologists.⁷

It is important to stress that this is “not collaboration for collaboration’s sake”.¹² By posing the research question to a broad base of multidisciplinary experts from the start, the IR team can uncover different perspectives beyond their individual fields of expertise (Box 3). This can improve problem solving, create efficiency and mitigate against unintended detrimental impacts.^7,¹²

When bringing together a multidisciplinary team to design an IR project, it is important to maintain flexibility and be prepared to reorient thinking about the problem.¹¹

The importance of community engagement in One Health

Sustainable One Health approaches are inherently transdisciplinary, adaptive and are based on local, bottom-up community participation. Community participation and involvement in One Health IR projects is essential for mutual learning and can increase the research team’s access to new data and understanding of context.^13,¹⁴

When applying a One Health lens to IR projects, the team should consider involving relevant community members that reflect the interconnectedness of health, animal health and the environment, for example:

farmers
fisherman
park rangers
deep sea divers
wildfire firefighters
and community members who live near potential exposure sites.⁷

Including community-level stakeholders across all three domains will help strengthen implementation from the bottom up.⁷

Working with the community, the IR team should focus on discovery of local culture, knowledge and mechanisms for solving problems to ensure that interventions are practical and tailored to specific environmental and cultural contexts. Accessing and understanding indigenous knowledge is of particular importance in the One Health context (see Box 4).