At first glance, “One Health” can sound abstract, like an academic term that lives on slides and in strategy documents. For Dr. Kelsey Ripp, Assistant Professor in UGHE’s School of Medicine and the Centre for One Health, it’s the opposite: One Health is a way of seeing, a practice of attention. It is the recognition that people, animals, and environments share and shape one another’s health everyday. Teaching that worldview, she says, is how she gives back, both to her students and to the communities they will serve. 

“I believe teaching about the connection between animal, environmental, and human health helps students improve patient care and advocate for holistic health approaches,” she says. “Medical school is a crazy time where you learn so much, and transition from being a student reading books to taking care of a patient who sometimes literally puts their life in your hands, in an astoundingly short period of time.”  

For Dr. Kelsey, One Health gives students a wider lens for that transition, helping them link symptoms to stories and diagnoses to the living conditions that make people well, or unwell. 

Learning from the land and its people 

Part of Dr. Kelsey’s perspective comes from her clinical work with the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium, a health system run by and for Indigenous communities. She works primarily in the hospital and has also served in clinic settings in remote villages. The experience has sharpened her understanding of how intimately health is tied to place. 

“I cannot adequately speak for this population, as I am not Alaska Native,” she says carefully. “But I am aware that these communities have strong connections with their land, which includes the animals on it and the environment they share.” That connection is not a metaphor; it is memory, identity, and survival. She recalls a patient living with severe depression who traced part of his suffering to how quickly the land around his village was changing. Intensive mining had altered the landscape so drastically that it no longer felt like home, no longer looked like the place where his ancestors had lived for thousands of years. Elsewhere, entire villages are planning to relocate because of sea-level rise.  

“These environmental and social factors are playing out in the background,” Dr. Ripp says, “and fundamentally affect the way and ability of people to access medical care.” 

Working with rural communities in Rwanda has reinforced the same lesson. Whether in the highlands of the Northern Province or along Alaska’s coasts, people live closely with their environments and with domestic or wild animals. When the environment changes, health changes—sometimes suddenly, often silently.  

“Traditional biomedical training focuses on artificial boundaries that don’t exist in the real world,” she says. “Our future healthcare leaders need to think across these boundaries from day one.” 

Teaching the connection 

At UGHE, Dr. Kelsey brings this orientation into lecture halls, case discussions, and bedside teaching. She doesn’t only teach medicine, she teaches connection. The one between the land and our lungs, between livestock and livelihoods, between water access and wound healing, between what doctors know and what they must still learn from patients themselves. 

“I’ve always been interested in the ways we humans impact our environment and how our environment impacts us,” she reflects. “Much of what we learn as medical students focuses on the biology of the patient in front of us, but the ecological and social context in which that patient lives is critical.”  

Her courses ask students to practice taking a “One Health history,” adding questions about work, animals, housing, travel, water and sanitation, and environmental exposures to the standard medical interview. The goal isn’t to collect more data for its own sake; it’s to surface the real-world drivers of disease and to open the door to prevention, advocacy, and dignified care. 

Dr. Kelsey keeps a quiet pride when she speaks about her students’ growth. The stories often reach her secondhand. One, though, has stayed with her. A young man had been admitted with advanced lung disease, dependent on oxygen. A student, using the One Health history, dug deeper into his work life and learned he had spent years in mining without adequate protective equipment. That context reframed everything, his symptoms, exam, and imaging, pointing to silicosis, a preventable lung disease associated with silica exposure. 

“The diagnosis mattered,” she says, “but what made me even more proud was what came next.” The students advocated for the patient to receive a home oxygen concentrator through Inshuti Mu Buzima (IMB), allowing him to leave the hospital and return to his family. It was a small victory inside a larger story about occupational safety and social protection, but it showed the overlap between One Health and social medicine in practice. 

Giving back, quietly and consistently 

Ask Dr. Kelsey what “giving back” looks like, and she won’t talk about podiums or plaques. She talks about attention. About showing up prepared. About teaching students to ask one more question, to listen a bit longer, to look beyond the presenting complaint. 

“Teaching is how I give back,” she says simply. “If students leave my class ready to see connections, and to treat those connections as clinically relevant, then they will care for patients more completely. They’ll be better advocates for healthier environments, safer workplaces, and communities that can thrive.” 

UGHE’s approach to One Health is not an elective or a footnote; it is part of how future clinicians and public health leaders are formed. Dr. Kelsey’s work sits squarely in that mission. 

“The Essence of Giving Back” is a blog series that explores both the big and small ways our community is making a difference. At UGHE, we believe giving back is more than a charitable act, it is a philosophy of service, empathy, and responsibility. It involves contributing time, effort, or resources to a cause or community without the expectation of personal gain. Giving back is about creating a positive impact and uplifting others, often through small, intentional acts of kindness and support. Stay tuned for the following episodes.