Advancing One Health:Updated core competencies

International audienceAbstract One Health recognises the interdependence between the health of humans, animals, plants and the environment. With the increasing inclusion of One Health in multiple global health strategies, the One Health workforce must be prepared to protect and sustain the health and well-being of life on the planet. In this paper, a review of past and currently accepted One Health core competencies was conducted, with competence gaps identified. Here, the Network for Ecohealth and One Health (NEOH) propose updated core competencies designed to simplify what can be a complex area, grouping competencies into three main areas of: Skills; Values and Attitudes; and Knowledge and Awareness; with several layers underlying each. These are intentionally applicable to stakeholders from various sectors and across all levels to support capacity-building efforts within the One Health workforce. The updated competencies from NEOH can be used to evaluate and enhance current curricula, create new ones, or inform professional training programs at all levels, including students, university teaching staff, or government officials as well as continual professional development for frontline health practitioners and policy makers. The competencies are aligned with the new definition of One Health developed by the One Health High-Level Expert Panel (OHHLEP), and when supported by subjectspecific expertise, will deliver the transformation needed to prevent and respond to complex global challenges. One Health Impact Statement Within a rapidly changing global environment, the need for practitioners competent in integrated approaches to health has increased substantially. Narrow approaches may not only limit opportunities for global and local solutions but, initiatives that do not consider other disciplines or social, economic and cultural contexts, may result in unforeseen and detrimental consequences. In keeping with principles of One Health, the Network for Ecohealth and One Health (NEOH) competencies entail a collaborative effort between multiple disciplines and sectors. They focus on enabling practitioners, from any background, at any level or scale of involvement, to promote and support a transformation to integrated health approaches. The updated competencies can be layered with existing disciplinary competencies and used to evaluate and enhance current education curricula, create new ones, or inform professional training programs at all levels-including for students, teachers and government officials as well as continual professional development for frontline health practitioners and policymakers. The competencies outlined here are applicable to all professionals and disciplines who may contribute to One Health, and are complimentary to, not a replacement for, any discipline-specific competencies. We believe the NEOH competencies meet the need outlined by the Quadripartite’s (Food and Agriculture Organisation, United Nations Environment Programme, World Health Organisation, World Organisation for Animal Health) Joint Plan of Action on One Health which calls for cross-sectoral competencies

Structure and organisation of government project UK 1980-2013

The dataset is a record of the structure of UK government departments as organizational phases in the period 1st January 1980 to 31st December 2013. Each row in the dataset constitutes a single organizational phase, distinguished by a unique ID, delimited by a start and end date, linked to other phases through lists of successors and predecessors, and characterized by many time-invariant factors that describe organization attributes. Organizational phases describe the life history of organizational units for the sampling period by breaking that history into multiple, non-overlapping durations.The research asks why some administrative organizations are created then reorganized, merged, or terminated, whereas others are seemingly 'immortal' and even can become more powerful than the elected politicians that created and control them? This question has become pertinent, especially in the past three decades, within European parliamentary democracies. By the end of the 1970s, when the golden era of welfare state expansion and state growth came to an end, a new generation of political leaders such as President Ronald Reagan of the United States and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of the United Kingdom initiated a series of administrative reform trajectories - privatization, deregulation, agencification, liberalization, decentralization, and New Public Management - with the aim to fundamentally alter the scope and scale of central government and sparked off several reform trajectories across the developed and developing economies. However, Western politicians who embarked on these trajectories soon found out that changing the structure and organization of their central governments was a hard nut to crack. When successful, the consequences of succeeding in reforms were often increasing fragmentation and rising coordination costs. The difficulties encountered by politicians when embarking on the road of administrative change mean that taming and changing the structure and organization of government, designing it so as to have government serve the interests of the public, is not an easy goal to reach. This project develops and applies a novel framework that will systematically map and explain organizational changes within central government cross-nationally in four European parliamentary democracies, France, Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, over the last three decades, the period following the initiation of New Public Management reforms in the United Kingdom and elsewhere in advanced economies. The framework identifies patterns of change in and between ministries and agencies. It compares the organizational change not only between and across countries, but also within and across specific policy sectors. The framework is longitudinal as it traces organizational changes across time. This project builds upon the most influential theory of the structure and organization of central governments, which is the theory of the politics of structural choice. This theory, developed and applied within the context of the United States presidential system, claims that the structure and organization of central government is the resultant of political negotiations on the institutional design of administrative organizations between the main political actors. To be more precise, the theory argues that the structure of central government is a function of politicians' preferences for institutional designs that insulate administrative organizations from direct political control. The theory has been tested in the United States but this project analyses the machineries of central government that exist within the context of parliamentary democracies. We ask: To what extent do changes to the structure and organization of central government within European parliamentary democracies follow the same political logic as Lewis has found for the national state in the US presidential separation-of-power system? To what extent is political insulation a driving logic of administrative design? If not, what are the determinants of administrative design in parliamentary democracies and what is the role that institutions play? Can the theory of structural choice, once adapted to parliamentary democracies, explain changes - or the lack thereof - within the institutional context of parliamentary democracies?</p

PRINTS and its automatic supplement, prePRINTS

The PRINTS database houses a collection of protein fingerprints. These may be used to assign uncharacterised sequences to known families and hence to infer tentative functions. The September 2002 release (version 36.0) includes 1800 fingerprints, encoding ∼11 000 motifs, covering a range of globular and membrane proteins, modular polypeptides and so on. In addition to its continued steady growth, we report here the development of an automatic supplement, prePRINTS, designed to increase the coverage of the resource and reduce some of the manual burdens inherent in its maintenance. The databases are accessible for interrogation and searching at http://www.bioinf.man.ac.uk/dbbrowser/PRINTS/

PRINTS and PRINTS-S shed light on protein ancestry

The PRINTS database houses a collection of protein fingerprints. These may be used to make family and tentative functional assignments for uncharacterised sequences. The September 2001 release (version 32.0) includes 1600 fingerprints, encoding ∼10 000 motifs, covering a range of globular and membrane proteins, modular polypeptides and so on. In addition to its continued steady growth, we report here its use as a source of annotation in the InterPro resource, and the use of its relational cousin, PRINTS-S, to model relationships between families, including those beyond the reach of conventional sequence analysis approaches. The database is accessible for BLAST, fingerprint and text searches at http://www.bioinf.man.ac.uk/dbbrowser/PRINTS/