One Health

📖 When People Can't Access Care, Their Pets May Be Affected Too

A new article in the Journal of One Health Systems examines how unmet human healthcare needs and unmet veterinary care needs can occur within the same households.

"Co-occurring Unmet Needs in Human and Veterinary Care: Structural Barriers and Severity of Veterinary Outcomes Across US Households"

🔗 https://doi.org/10.7290/johs.4913

The One Health connection is clear: people and pets share the same household resources and many of the same barriers to care.

Those barriers can include:

     🐾  Cost
     🚗  Transportation
     🏠  Housing instability
     📍  Geographic access
     🩺  Availability of healthcare and veterinary providers
     💵  Competing household expenses

For helping professionals, veterinarians, public health professionals, animal welfare organizations, and community agencies, this research reinforces an important point:

Unmet needs should not always be viewed as isolated human or animal problems. They may reflect broader structural barriers affecting the entire household.

This perspective can help communities:

• identify gaps in services
• improve cross-sector referrals
• include pet-related needs in human-service planning
• consider human needs in veterinary and animal welfare settings
• develop policies and programs that support the whole pet family

Read the article and consider what barriers exist in your own community-and where stronger coordination between human and animal services could help.

Healthy people. Healthy pets. Healthy communities. One Health.

🔗 https://doi.org/10.7290/johs.4913

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T' Fisher, Director of Operations
Center for Pet Family Well-Being
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In 12 years working with underserved pet owners at The Inner Pup, I've never personally seen a pet's lack of care stand alone when the family was doing well. There are always other barriers. And sometimes, especially with an elderly person living alone, the pet is getting better care than the person.

We can't fix everything, but we've always found something that eases the burden through our network of local government and nonprofit partners. This is one place AI can be so helpful: pose the question......here's what this family is facing, who locally can help? Who should we call first, who offers direct help, and who can connect us to someone else? 

Families live in communities, and I feel we share responsibility for keeping people and their pets from falling through the cracks. But it takes a partnership. Families have to participate in helping themselves, doing what they can to make things better. When physical or developmental disabilities or mental and emotional struggles make that difficult, we need agencies that understand those barriers and know how to help.

For us, it starts with meeting people where they are, figuring things out together, and following through. Then checking back. Did the help actually help? Did the changes stick? Or are the same barriers putting everyone right back where they started?