The Clinical Encounter as a Gateway to One Health: Rethinking Communication Education in Veterinary Curricula

Communication is an accepted clinical competency in veterinary medicine, taught and increasingly assessed during the veterinarian–client consultation. However, the same encounter is also the profession’s most frequent point of contact with antimicrobial stewardship, zoonotic risk, food safety and public trust in science, and the population- and public-facing communication demanded by the One Health role remains comparatively overlooked in veterinary curricula. This narrative review reframes the clinical consultation not as the boundary of veterinary communication but as its gateway. Synthesizing current literature on communication teaching in veterinary education, it argues that provision is heavily weighted towards the dyadic core and comparatively silent on interprofessional, community, public health and digital communication. On this basis, it proposes an integrated Communication Competency Continuum, in which five transversal competencies (relational, informational, behavior change, risk and audience adaptation) are progressively re-contextualized from the clinical dyad outward to the One Health mandate, anchored in established competency frameworks and made explicitly assessable. Offered as a conceptual contribution rather than a prescription, the continuum is not intended to replace clinical communication training, which should be preserved, but to extend it, so that veterinary communication education matches the breadth of the profession’s role.