Faculty development and partnership with students to integrate sustainable healthcare into health professions education

Abstract

There is an urgent need for health professionals to address the impacts of accelerating global environmental change. Healthcare faculty therefore have to educate the rising generation of health professionals in subjects unfamiliar to themselves, such as planetary health and sustainable healthcare. This creates a new paradigm where faculty have to learn a new subject area and incorporate and teach it within their own material. It is important to develop faculty knowledge and confidence to integrate education for sustainable healthcare into their educational practice, as faculty can rapidly acquire and build on these skills. Partnership between students and faculty can enhance this faculty development as students bring fresh ideas and possibly greater knowledge of the climate and ecological crisis. Under supervision, they can co-create the necessary new learning. Students can also act as partners in advocating for social and environmental fairness and systemic change toward a sustainable healthcare system. We summarize the impact of various activities of health professions students around the world which advocate for institutional change and enhance faculty development in education for sustainable healthcare. Through diverse case studies from different countries, we illustrate faculty development in education for sustainable healthcare, highlighting student involvement which has enhanced educators' learning.

Sustainability in quality improvement (SusQI): a case-study in undergraduate medical education

“…The video-linked Hub software proved invaluable as it allowed experts to teach both students and teaching fellows across eight teaching hospitals simultaneously. Previous research suggests that new topics can be effectively disseminated to clinical teachers through partnership approaches [ 40 ], including ‘trickle up’ learning as students discuss projects with their supervisors [ 41 ]. This model could therefore be effective for engaging both undergraduates and their clinical teachers, thus accelerating the development of a critical mass of SusQI-educated health professionals.…”

Education for sustainable healthcare: Leadership to get from here to there

“…The overarching vision for ESH through this time of great change is seen through the lens of collective (Eckert et al 2014) and regenerative (Hutchins and Storm 2019) leadership. The ESH vision emphasises environmental accountability through the active stewardship (caretaking) of resources by all stakeholders while providing faculty development that ensures a well-prepared health workforce that is knowledgeable about the impact and influence the environment has on health (Tun et al 2020). This concluding commentary identifies the next steps for the implementation of the ESH vision by building on the information, knowledge, experience and wisdom presented in the previous papers, and highlighted by relevant…”

Healthcare workforce transformation: implementing patient-centered medical home standards in an academic medical center

“…Successful implementation of PCMH requires coordination and training of a highly diversified and large workforce [ 1 , 8 , 9 ] and we utilized change management principles and drew upon the literature about organizational behavior to undertake this transformation [ 2 – 4 , 6 , 13 – 16 ]. In particular, our implementation strategy paid careful attention to the fact that each individual health care professional – whether faculty or trainee– has limited hours available for educational activities.…”

“…These incentives have spurred a variety of innovations in graduate and undergraduate medical education– predominantly in the fields of Family Medicine and Internal Medicine [ 3 , 7 ]—but little has been done for faculty. Since PCMH metrics regularly evolve and many faculty are relative novices in this area, the classic linear educational model is no longer applicable and requires faculty to learn concurrently with the entire healthcare workforce including trainees [ 8 , 9 ]. Despite the importance of thorough implementation to achieve optimal outcomes of PCMH, including reduced expenditure,[ 10 ] little has been published about real-world PCMH implementation efforts across the healthcare workforce.…”