By Owen Dan Luo, Rosemarie Vincent, Sumara Stroshein, Omar Taboun, & Alanna Jane
Climate change has been identified as the largest global health threat of the 21st century, and tackling it could be our greatest health opportunity. The healthcare system plays a major role in responding to and mitigating the effects of climate change. Not only does climate change weaken the health system’s ability to respond to mounting threats, the healthcare sector is itself a significant contributor to climate change, with Canadian healthcare being responsible for 4.6 per cent of Canada’s national greenhouse gas emissions. Healthcare professionals are reported to be the most trusted professionals in the public eye and are thus well-positioned to initiate and lead discussions on the health effects of climate change. The 2020 Report of the Lancet Countdown states that “doctors, nurses, and the broader profession have a central role in health system adaptation and mitigation, in understanding and maximizing the health benefits of any intervention, and in communicating the need for an accelerated response.”
The Health and Environment Adaptive Response Task Force (HEART) is a national collective of medical students across Canada that was established by the Canadian Federation of Medical Students (CFMS) in 2016. HEART’s goal is to coordinate medical student-led advocacy efforts nationally regarding current issues in environmental health and climate change. In order to mobilize Canadian medical students to improve the environmental performance of the Canadian healthcare system, the CFMS HEART Committee has launched “Project Green Healthcare/Projet Vert la Santé” (PGH/PVLS) in September 2020. PGH/PVLS is the first-of-its-kind national community of practice that equips medical student teams with funding and partners them with physicians and health sector leaders from the Canadian Association of Physicians (CAPE) for the Environment and the Canadian Coalition of Green Healthcare (CCGHC) to conduct quality improvement and medical education projects to advance net-zero Canadian healthcare.
In its inaugural year, the PGH/PVLS program empowered nine medical student teams of over 50 medical students distributed over seven medical schools in five Canadian provinces and partnered them with over 80 interdisciplinary experts, administrative offices, physicians, and green teams. Notable achievements of our inaugural cohort include developing point-of-care decision aids to encourage anesthesiologists in Hamilton, ON to choose gases with lower environmental impacts and launching online modules on the environmental benefits of the Choosing Wisely primary care guidelines for family physicians: https://www.greenchoosingwisely.com/. The new 21-22 PGH/PVLS cohort consists of 9 medical student teams distributed across seven provinces. Many of the new cohort of PGH/PVLS medical student teams have made it their mission to tackle healthcare waste; they are implementing quality improvement projects to encourage recycling and optimize waste streaming in intensive care units, emergency departments and operating rooms.
There is a critical need to build a net-zero Canadian healthcare service that promotes patient, community and planetary health in a climate emergency. Our national community of practice empowers medical student-driven local innovation to permit timely wins in low-carbon healthcare delivery and inform the rapid scale-up of effective local quality improvement project designs onto the national scale. PGH/PVLS is always recruiting motivated healthcare providers, hospital staff, and healthcare administrators across Canada who would be interested in partnering with medical students to access local resources and navigate the healthcare system and administration to execute collaborative healthcare sustainability quality improvement projects. If you are interested in mentoring a local Project Green Healthcare/Projet Vert la Santé medical student team, please complete this google form here: bit.ly/ProjectGreenHealthcareInterestForm. For more details about the program and our teams, please visit https://www.cfms.org/what-we-do/global-health/greening-healthcare-initiative
This article was provided by Project Green Healthcare.
