Welcome video

Welcome to Driving Sustainable Healthcare: Educate, Engage and Empower a course on Environmental Sustainability and Healthcare.

We are excited that so many of you have chosen to join us on this course!

Food for thought!

Eckart Von Hirsch, a German physician, is the founder of the “Healthy Planet – Healthy People Foundation”. In a recent presentation for “CleanMed 2023” he suggested that health does not start with drugs, operations or hospitals, but with the following five things:

The air that we breathe
The water that we drink
The plants that we eat
The temperatures that we live in
and
Living in peace i.e. in a peaceful environment.

With this in mind, he finished his talk with a quote from Dame Jane Morris Goodall DBE, an English primatologist and anthropologist, considered the world’s foremost expert on chimpanzees.

“How can it be that human beings always emphasise that they are the most intelligent species on earth and we are destroying our home?” —- Jane Goodall.

The course is closely linked to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, a collection of 17 global goals adopted by all United Nations Member States. They are designed to be a “blueprint to achieve a better and more sustainable future for all”.

In this course we will be focusing on Goal 13: “Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts”

You can find out more about these goals in the document attached at the bottom of this page.

In this opening week you will:

• Investigate what causes climate change by looking at your contributions both at a national and personal level.
• Consider how healthcare provision impacts directly on climate change.
• Reflect on how our changing climate affects our health.

Sustainability in healthcare is such a vast topic and this course will not been able to cover everything. We aim to give you a comprehensive overview and we have included the topics which we feel will be most useful.

Throughout the course, we will give you examples of case studies from all over the world, and there will be opportunities to delve in deeper into topics if you wish; these extra topics and links are not required to complete the course.

We are really looking forward to learning with and from you and hope that you enjoy your journey with us!