One Health and Planetary Health Education: An Exploratory Assessment of Undergraduate Awareness and Curricular Perceptions, with a Pilot Postgraduate Teaching Session

Background: One Health is one of several complementary systems-oriented frameworks used to understand the interdependence of human, animal, and environmental health and its relationship with planetary health. Its formal visibility in university education remains uneven. Objectives: This exploratory study examined familiarity with the term One Health, the ability to define it, and perceptions of its curricular inclusion among undergraduate students in Education, Nursing, and Biology. It also described immediate post-session outcomes in a separate cohort of Master’s students in Secondary Education Teacher Training (Biology specialisation). Methods: Phase 1 was a cross-sectional study of 80 undergraduates recruited by convenience sampling (Education n = 22; Nursing n = 45; Biology n = 13). Descriptive statistics and exploratory Kruskal–Wallis analyses of coded curricular-perception responses were used. Phase 2 was a single-group pilot teaching session involving 18 Master’s students, followed by an immediate post-session questionnaire; it did not include a full pre-test, control group, or delayed follow-up. Results: In Phase 1, no participant reported familiarity with the term or provided a correct definition (0% awareness; 0% correct definition). No statistically significant between-group differences were observed for the four curricular-perception variables. In Phase 2, immediately after the 90-min session, 100% of participants reported awareness of the term and 94.4% provided a correct definition; responses also favored broad disciplinary and curricular inclusion. Conclusions: Within this single-institution convenience sample, formal familiarity with One Health was absent among the undergraduates surveyed. The separate pilot cohort showed high immediate declarative recall after a brief teaching session, but the design cannot establish causal effects, retention, systems-thinking competence, or institutional curricular impact. The findings support larger, multi-institutional and longitudinal studies and the evaluation of feasible, resource-conscious ways to integrate One Health and planetary health literacy into existing programmes.