Determinants of the use of Digital One Health amongst medical and veterinary students at the University of Buea, Cameroon

Digital tools help foster collaboration within the One Health (OH) framework. Identifying factors that influence the use of Digital One Health (DOH) among medical and veterinary students is critical to improving its inclusion into future healthcare practices, hence the need of this study.

This is a school-based cross-sectional study was carried out from December 2023 to June 2024. Data collection on socio-demography, awareness of DOH, capacity building, and digital competencies were collected as from 19 ^th February to 5 ^th May 2024. Descriptive statistics used to summarize awareness, capacity building, and digital competencies of participants. Multiple logistic regression helped identify determinants of the use of DOH.

The results revealed that, of 400 participants enrolled, 318 (79.5%) had not heard of DOH, 334 (83.4%) had never received capacity building on DOH. Encountering DOH information from health information sources (AOR= 3.88 [95%CI: 1.66 – 9.03], p=0.002), receiving capacity building on DOH (AOR= 3.06 [95%CI: 1.15 – 8.16], p=0.026), having data privacy and security concerns (AOR= 3.75 [95%CI: 1.45 – 9.73], p=0.007), knowledge of five digital technologies used in OH (AOR= 15.43 [95%CI: 3.69 – 64.52], p=0.001) and access to at least one school technological infrastructure (AOR= 2.94 [95%CI: 1.23 – 7.03], p=0.015) significantly increase the odds of DOH engagement.

In Conclusion, Awareness and capacity building on DOH is low amongst medical and veterinary students of the University of Buea. Encountering DOH information from health information sources, capacity building, data privacy/ security concerns, knowledge of the various digital technologies used in OH, and access to school technological infrastructures, is vital to DOH engagement by medical and veterinary students at the University of Buea.