In 2024, the World Health Organization (WHO) with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and World Organisation for Animal Health (WOAH), jointly developed the Competencies for One Health Field Epidemiology (COHFE) framework. This framework defines the knowledge, skills and competencies needed for field epidemiology training programmes to implement the multisectoral, One Health approach.
Critical to the development of this leading-edge framework has been the collaboration and contributions from experts across the globe representing multiple sectors, including public health, animal health and the environment, with a broad range of experience in One Health and field epidemiology training.
To demonstrate the extent to which these cross-cutting inputs and insights informed the framework development, contributors to the COHFE framework from WHO, FAO and WOAH have written a publication articulating the collaborative, inclusive, and iterative process by which it was developed. We are very proud to announce that this joint paper, the Competencies for One Health Field Epidemiology (COHFE)—a framework to train the epidemiology workforce, has now been published in the journal One Health Outlook.
We hope that the approach that is described in this publication will give confidence to our stakeholders and partners, motivating countries to implement the COHFE framework in existing or newly developed training programmes. The framework itself represents a successful multisectoral partnership and its implementation will result in a stronger, more collaborative field epidemiology workforce able to strengthen global health security using the One Health approach.
Download the guidance / framework - www.who.int/initiatives/cohfe-framework
Learn more about how the framework was developed here!