Collaborations on education for sustainable healthcare

Abstract

Sustainable healthcare is a hot topic, andnot just because of its relationship to awarming planet. In the last two editions ofSurgo, the topic of sustainable health care,and of the impact of climate change onhealth has been introduced by the Head ofUndergraduate School of MedicineProfessor Malcolm Shepherd and by theSurgo Editor Anna Bradford. Education for Sustainable Healthcare (ESH)to call it by one of its accepted names (theother being SHE – Sustainable HealthcareEducation), has become crucially importantfor medical schools globally since theintroduction of the Planetary Health ReportCard, which ranks medical schools based ontheir engagement with planetary health.Glasgow has received a C- this year – whilstit is an improvement on our previous score,clearly more work is needed. So how can we educate our students on theimportance of sustainable healthcare, andof the recognised interplay between healthand climate change? Dr Noy Basu, our vertical theme lead for global and planetaryhealth has energetically implementedplanetary health into the teaching andassessment of the Glasgow MBChB, but thiscan be challenging. Whilst most, if not all,faculty members are enthusiastic, it can bedaunting for any lecturer accustomed todelivering teaching on a subject they havein-depth expertise in, to add in content onthe impact of climate change – a topicscarcely any of our faculty were themselvestaught as students. To further our efforts toinclude ESH into the MBChB curriculum,faculty development is therefore required a challenge encountered by most medicalschools in the UK and globally. The solution is collaboration. In 2022, theMedical Schools Council published an ESHcurriculum, and to support itsimplementation, the University of GlasgowMedical School, together with a nationaltask force, has set up an MSC supportedESH network, with representatives fromevery established medical school in the UK.The aims of this group will include: toprovide support in implementing ESH, tocollaborate in faculty developmentinitiatives and to share resources freelywhich can be adapted for each of our variedcurricula. A first meeting in March served as anintroduction, and we are looking forward togetting started with faculty support at thenext meeting taking place in June. This network follows in the footsteps of theUniversitas 21 Health Sciences GroupSustainable Development Goals network, an international and interprofessionalpartnership which the University ofGlasgow Medical School has been a part ofsince 2017. The network has established aGlobal Learning Partnership, which takesplace in Nepal, and at which University ofGlasgow students have had atransformative experience every year, as aself-proposed SSC. The network alsoorganises an annual student workshopweekend – it takes place in June inNottingham, and this year looks at big dataand sustainability. The University ofGlasgow is taking five students across theschools of medicine, dentistry and nursing.The network has also created teachingresources in the form of case studies, whichare freely available, and which we use in our“Introduction to sustainable healthcare”SSC. Collaboration, under the guise ofpartnerships, is one of the SDGs itself(number 17), and it is so important and keyto delivering the other SDGs that it is theonly mandatory SDG reported in the TimesHigher Education (THE) IMPACT awards,ranking universities globally based on theirimpact on the SDGs. So let’s celebrate collaboration nationallyand internationally to empower our facultyto deliver ESH, and hope to see the fruits ofthese collaborations in a curriculum nearyou soon!