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| Batman cohabits with Future Health Leader Rebecca Irwin. |
How often do you get together with health professionals
in different fields? I’m not talking about other veterinarians so much as
health professionals that care for the non-veterinary species – doctors,
nurses, speech pathologists, dieticians and so on.
A One Health approach demands that we consider the health
and well-being, and impacts of intervention (or not) on humans and the
environment, as well as animals. It also demands that we get out of our silos
and mix with people from other disciplines.
Future Health Leaders (FHL) is an organisation for
students and early career health professionals, including veterinarians, from
all across Australia. Their mission is to “work with communities to create
better health outcomes for all Australians regardless of gender, culture,
background or location.”
I was fortunate enough to join some of their members for
dinner last week, and we had some amazing conversations, ranging from the
inevitable comparing of how we treat animals versus humans, to the challenges
of providing sustainable care to groups with limited access to health or
veterinary care, to zoonoses, environmental issues that are likely to impact
health (and let’s face it, environment has a major impact on our health and
wellbeing already), to talking about collaborative projects. We talked about
how sometimes the most productive collaborations are born not from deliberate
efforts but informal conversations, issues people develop a shared curiosity
about, and pursuing questions that arise over a cup of tea.
If you’re a student or early career animal health
professional (and I’m not too certain how early is early!) I would recommend
joining this group. Rebecca Irwin, the winner of the FHL Future Leader Award,
was a nurse before she enrolled in a medical degree. As she said, and I am
paraphrasing shamelessly here as I was eating at the time, “when we graduate
we’re expected to work in a multidisciplinary team but we don’t have formal
contact with other health professionals like nurses…”
She developed an innovative program to facilitate that
contact between medical students and students of other health professions. The
program has been incredibly successful. I am certain that future health teams
will be more effective because of this initiative.
Not only is Rebecca a person who overcomes obstacles, her
dog Batman can do that too – clearing 6ft high fences in one leap!
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| Batman, looking pretty stoked. |
By the way, we're happy to accept contributions to The Vet Cook Book from future health leaders who treat any species. Please email us for directions: vetcookbook[a]gmail.com.
