About Us
Climate Wise Slides website provides evidence-based educational material in a systems-based organization, allowing individual students to engage with planetary health teaching in topics of their interest, and for medical schools to utilize our material for longitudinal curriculum implementation.
Our Goals:
implementing evidence-based planetary health education into the undergraduate medical curriculum
educating medical students on both the relationship between the changing climate and our health and the impact healthcare has on the environment
improving the choices we can make as future healthcare providers to provide high-value care for patients on a smaller ecological footprint
Who are we
The Climate Wise team is a group of medical students across Canada passionate about connecting the dots between climate change and health in medical education. The team is made up of students interested in a wide array of planetary health concepts including greening healthcare, direct/indirect health impacts of climate change, eco-health promotion, climate justice and advocacy. Climate change has been deemed the greatest global health challenge of the 21st century and future physicians must be prepared to adapt to and mitigate the increasing health impacts of climate change . Climate Wise slides is one of many approaches needed at filling in the gaps on climate health teaching in the medical curriculum. Each year, Climate Wise hopes to recruit more medical students from across Canada to ensure climate change and planetary health teaching are being adequately represented in the medical curriculum to ensure that all Canadian physicians are equipped with the skills and competencies to care for patients and communities in a climate crisis.
Members:
Executive: Celia Walker, Nicole Mancini, Owen Dan Luo, Ericka Iny, Tyler Warnock
Contributors: Kavya Anchuri, Chin Vern Tan, Sanjana Sudershan, Jordyn Shaw, Jessica Round, Andrew Schmaus, Mack Blydt-Hansen, Anda Gaita, Tania Morin, Alexander Valerio, Xena Wang, Liam Cooper-Brown, Anne-Sophie Roy, Jessica Benady-Chorney
Why we do this
The Lancet Countdown on health and climate change highlights the progressively worsening impact of climate change on food scarcity, extreme weather events and heat waves, wildfires, air pollution, and infectious diseases. Despite this, teaching on the impacts of climate change on our health and ways to mitigate its impacts is lacking at medical schools across Canada (CFMS HEART* National Report on Planetary Health Education – January, 2020). The HEART report outlines nine key recommendations for medical schools including, “With student and faculty input, work to develop specific longitudinal learning objectives for engaging planetary health education throughout the duration of medical education”.
*Canadian Federation of Medical Students - Health and the Environment Adaptive Response Taskforce
