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The Urgency of Addressing Climate and Health
Climate change is having direct impacts on health, and these are expected to increase. According to the National Academies of Medicine, the American Public Health Association, and other experts, it is imperative for health professionals to be prepared to help our patients weather these impacts. Before joining the CAST Fellowship, I worked with a group of professors at Duke on interprofessional educational learning activities on climate and health, but these activities were optional and only reached a few of the students in our programs.
Identifying Opportunities within the Curriculum
I saw an opportunity to include climate and health within the mandatory courses in our physician assistant (PA) curriculum, and I chose this for the project I would complete during my CAST fellowship. Our curriculum is tightly packed since it is designed to produce competent clinicians in two years and there is not curricular space for an additional course. Integration of climate health content throughout existing courses seemed most appropriate and efficient. It is also the most intuitive for students. For example, why would they not learn about climate impacts on asthma while they were studying asthma, instead of in a separate course?
Launching with an Introductory Session
I started with an introductory session to provide an overview of the field of Climate and Health, and to attempt to convince students of its applicability to their future practice. Following the tenets of adult education theory, I sought to honor our graduate students’ lived experience by using an audience response system to solicit students’ ideas about how climate could impact health. As I expected, they had many ideas, some of which are shown in the tables below. This allowed me to refer back to their ideas as I presented the session content.
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I continued this pattern of asking their thoughts prior to presenting information as I gave an overview of climate impacts on health, the disproportionate impacts of climate change on different populations, and strategies that healthcare providers can use to help to mitigate climate change and to help our patients adapt to climate-related health challenges. Finally, following advice from seasoned educators in climate health, I concluded by acknowledging the emotional response that many of us have to the sometimes-overwhelming impacts of climate change, and offered suggestions to improve our resilience.
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After this introductory session, I worked with my colleagues, all of whom were eager to participate, to integrate relevant climate health content into their teaching. For example, we added content on the mental health impacts of climate into the psychiatry unit. For our pharmacology instruction, we taught how common medications can impact the ability of people to tolerate extreme heat, and how to minimize these effects. In our surgery course, we highlighted the large carbon footprint of surgery practice and presented some solutions that are being implemented to address this problem.
Looking Ahead
There are some additional topics that should be added to our integrated curriculum on climate impacts on health, but I think we made a good start this year. I plan to submit a brief report to our PA Education Journal in hopes of making it easier for other PA educators to integrate the crucial topic of climate and health into their training programs.
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This blog was written by Perri Morgan as part of a CAST Fellows' outreach effort to share resources and personal experiences in designing courses to engage Duke students across disciplines with topics of sustainability and climate change.