Published: 03/05/2024
“Increasingly, health-care professionals are confronted with the reality that climate and the environment are major determinants of health. To understand disease, they need to understand the environment. To care for patients, they also need to care for the environment.” So writes Global Health Media Fellow Mira Cheng in an article for Think Global Health that highlights efforts at medical schools across the US to adapt medical education to the realities of climate change.
In recent years, health professional schools countrywide, often led by medical students, have made strides toward incorporating planetary health into their curriculum, Cheng reports. Meanwhile, additional initiatives seek to address the need for continuing medical education for those who received their medical degrees before climate change became the threat it now is.
Medicine for a Changing Planet is one such initiative developed by the Stanford Center for Innovation in Global Health and UW Center for One Health Research.