Why Med Schools Are Including Climate Change In Their Curriculums

Looking at the report card, you’ll spot the occasional A (Emory School of Medicine; Minnesota School of Nursing) and A- (Keele University School of Medicine in England; University of California Berkeley). But C’s and D’s are more common. Clearly, we still have a ways to go before every health professional receives climate training.

One challenge to a wider rollout is that curriculums are already packed tight to prepare students for licensing exams. “Oftentimes, I hear people say the curriculum is so full, we can’t possibly teach one more thing,” Potter explains. But she notes that this is a weak argument, especially when you consider how quickly programs were able to pivot once COVID hit. “If there’s a will, there’s a way,” she says.

Most medical schools update their curriculum every few years as it is, and since climate impacts every facet of health, these themes can be pretty seamlessly integrated into existing lessons. It won’t take a complete overhaul. “The point of our proposed intervention was not to add significant curriculum time but to apply a climate lens to what we already learn,” Potarazu says, and she expects this is part of why her proposed plan was so well-received by faculty.

The bigger issue is finding people qualified to teach this information. “You’re dealing with a generation of faculty who, for the most part, went through their own education prior to the urgency of climate change and other environmental issues. So they aren’t necessarily prepared to teach about it,” Potter says.

One way around this is to create lesson plans that can be shared open access, as they are at Emory and Minnesota. This plug-and-play model allows faculty to easily work this information into their existing lessons, personalizing it as they see fit. A school in California might want to focus more on preventing respiratory issues from wildfire smoke, for example, while one in Arizona would hone in on treating adverse reactions to extreme heat.

Another approach is to train existing faculty members on climate topics as part of their continuing education. Sorenson kickstarted the 10-week Climate and Health Responder Course to help healthcare professionals around the world receive free expert-led training on these issues.

One day, hopefully in the not-so-distant future, these parallels might even appear on medical licensing exams6, future incentivizing faculty to prioritize them.

The thinking is that after this information is passed from faculty to students, it will then quickly get dispersed in communities. “If you have 100,000 medical students who are trained every year, then each one goes into a different community and is equipped to really be an advocate for environmental health in that community, we’re going to start seeing change,” Sorenson says.