Wake-Up Call for Action: The Current Situation of Public, Global and One Health Education during Medical School in Times of Globalization and Increasing Health Threats: A review

Public, Global, and One Health are individual approaches to health that partly influence each other and all are becoming increasingly important in medical education. ‘’Public Health’’ is an approach to protect and improve health of a population. Nevertheless, most health threats are transcended national boarders, so the “Global Health” approach is becoming increasingly relevant. The holistic approach "One Health" goes even further: in addition to human health, animal health and the environment must also be considered. All these approaches are influenced by globalization, the increasing immigration and the occurrence of pandemics. Accordingly, it is the responsibility of higher education institutes to integrate health approaches in their curriculum to train future physicians to meet the demands of their patients and the population.

This review reflects the current situation of the mentioned approaches in medical education in different countries from which data are available. The research shows that there exists a wide range of Public Health programms, but they are rarely assessed and only a small number of degrees programes is offered for physicians. In contrast to this, Global Health activities during medical education are more reported, and the main providers for Global Health education are medical schools. The necessity to implement One Health topics in medical curriculum is seen by many organizations, but there are just a few publications about the implementation in medical education available.

The main issue in educating health approaches is a missing standard; the dissent of competences, which are relevant to future practical use; the curriculums are oversaturated; and a lack of expertise to the topics. For the future there is a need to implement health approaches into the core curriculum of medical education. Therefore, it is a possibility to integrate the subjects into existing activities and to use didactic concepts, such as clinical rotation, problem-based learning, or case-based learning. In addition, interprofessional work and partnerships between medical and Public Health communities must be improved.

Public, Global, and One Health education requires a structured and comprehensive curriculum that ensures adequate training of medical students in an increasingly globalized world and diversified patient population.