Over a weekend in April 15 enthusiastic students arrived in London having travelled from as far as Belgium and Belfast, eager to start an international Climate Change and Health programme with the British Council and Medsin-UK.
So how exactly are 15 students going to make an impact on climate change? It’s a good question that even we, with our youth and naivety, were struggling to answer. But then that’s the point of training! Mustafa Abbas of the campaign Healthy Planet, David Pencheon of the NHS SDU, and Frances Mortimer of the Campaign for Greener Healthcare, had the challenge to empower and inspire us to return to our cities, and start our work to reduce the carbon footprint of our local health care authorities.
It turned out not to be as challenging as initially expected, with such an enthusiastic group and so much energy, by the end of the weekend we had all managed to make individual plans for our respective locations.
These plans were widely ranging, and concentrated on targeting either the area of management or clinical units, or both in those particularly optimistic. We explored how to contact our local healthcare authorities, and methods of working with management on sustainable development, as well as how to work within clinical areas to do the same. Our objective is to interact with the local decision makers to promote the strategy outlined by the Sustainable Development Unit.
David and Frances were able to equip us with how these aims had been managed in the past, while Mustafa provided us with the knowledge behind climate change.
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Hard at work at the Training Weekend...
The project will run in four phases:
- Phase one was the training weekend.
- Phase two will continue till November, during which we will act in the health sector, using our new learnt skills and support of the team. Throughout the time we will be evaluating and reflecting on progress made; using various means to communicate with each other including a blog http://bcmccp.blogspot.com/.
- Phase three will be another weekend where we will meet to celebrate achievements, and identify improvements.
- Phase four is where we are given the opportunity to become Programme Directors, and run the next cohort of the programme for 2011.
As a secondary objective we hope to interact with students and institutions internationally to promote health sector sustainability; the SDU is working with the international health sector, and students will act as the student-arm of these efforts. Through Medsin-UK’s involvement in the IFMSA, International Federation of Medical Students’ Associations, Healthy Planet’s international relations, and of course the British Council’s huge network of contacts, as well as our personal connections abroad, we will have more than enough countries that we can communicate with.
We also explored the objective of education and capacity building within the health profession; PHEMS (Public Health Educators at Medical Schools) climate change education project is something we were all excited to get running at our medical schools, but we are aware of our limitations, and that we can only do so much. Most of the group have expressed some interest in going back home and investigating the possibility of creating SSC/SSMs - Student Selected Components/Modules - in Climate Change and Health.
We left, exhausted, but really eager to get back to our home cities and find similarly minded individuals who would support us in our plans. As David says “hunt in packs; as one is an extremist, two are group and three is public opinion”, we all had strategies to disseminate what we learnt, and develop networks of climate change enthusiasts to aid us in our objectives. The easiest part is done as we formed our plans, the hard part starts now as we have to convince those in power that sustainable development is the only way forward.
Elly Pilavachi
University of Brighton and
Brighton and Sussex Medical School
“As a medical student I feel that I am more fitted to working within the clinical aspects of this programme because of past practical experience within the clinical setting. Programme transformations such as the nephrology example given by Frances, have great power to motivate others, and to be used as positive examples of successful carbon reduction strategies in terms of both financial and quality of service benefits. I am also interested in engaging health professionals into the 10:10 agreements. However, I am equally aware of the importance of 'top-down' changes in policy if we are to achieve long-term and significant carbon reduction restructuring.”
Phillipa Jeacock, University of Sheffield
“The big thing that's got me excited is that after sending out an email to Hull York med students (a pretty vague one basically saying 'who's interested in climate change and might possibly be interested in helping me out with a project I'm doing?') 30 people (i.e. 3-4% of the student body), some from every year, have replied. Which is great! So now there is a list of interested people who have offered to help me with things should I need it, but also I now know that a lot of students want to help. If I can get that across to local management then hopefully we can get more done- numbers matter and all that.”
Jessica Thornton, UCL and Hull York Medical School
“I hope to be in the forefront for a Greener NHS Scotland, and an example to other Medical Students that its everybody’s businesses not just a selected few.”
Gesner-Orlando Simon, University of Aberdeen
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