Taylor's path
I still remember the fury that ripped through me at age 7 as I dug holes with a sand shovel to replant the twigs of a tree my father had just cut down. At the time, I couldn't tell you what I was angry about, but my anger never quite dissipated.
Growing up, I spent many of my childhood and adolescent summers at my aunt's house tucked away along the Chesapeake Bay. It didn't get more ‘middle of nowhere’ to me than a mile long dirt driveway revealing a small 2-bedroom oasis that was surrounded on three sides by water and one side by endless marshland. Without cell service, wifi, or cable, we spent our time barefoot in the crabgrass, water, or dock. Things were peaceful and predictable until the water started to adopt an oily surface and the crab lines started coming up empty. This was my first taste of real loss. It felt like my connection to the environment around me was slowly and inevitably being ripped away. I didn't realize it then, but I had spent endless hours becoming fascinated by how our earth's intricate and delicate ecosystems work in harmony. I developed a fierce protective instinct over our earth, and my work began there.
Through high school and college, I researched, studied, and got involved in everything climate related that I could get my hands on. Along the way, my passion refined into connecting climate health to human health implications. I was determined to seek out classes or opportunities to engage in how climate health played a role in human health. I was constantly disappointed by how little I found in this emerging field. However, this absence presented a unique opportunity. As I pursued a double major of Environmental Studies and Biology in college, my path solidified. It became clear that we can no longer afford to live in a world oblivious to such a large impact. I felt like my whole life was preparing me for the projects that awaited me in medical school.
Savita's path
My favorite thing to do growing up on Saturdays was to run into my grandfather's house, jump on the couch and snag the latest Physics Today magazine about satellites that tracked extreme weather patterns. My grandfather served as a meteorologist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) for over 40 years. My fascination with weather patterns and appreciation for nature stemmed from his life's work to develop sophisticated mechanisms to track weather patterns.
As I grew older, I often turned to nature as a form of healing and felt saddened to see so much human-induced degradation in our environment. In college, I participated in outdoors clubs and urban gardening initiatives as forms of healing and decompression during stressful times. That was also when I developed a keen interest in social and environmental determinants of health and I began drawing links between extreme weather patterns and human health. Having spent my entire college and medical school career at George Washington University, I have had ample opportunities to help establish a community of interdisciplinary experts in the field of climate and health. The community I have found at GW and through Medical Students for a Sustainable Future (MS4SF) has been incredibly energizing and has filled me with hope for the future of our planet and patients.
Where our paths merge
When we got to medical school, this common passion inevitably united us. We were surrounded by a group of students and faculty colleagues who gave us the support and encouragement to set a passion into action. In the summer of 2020, our group of students laid the groundwork by assessing what climate topics were already in our curriculum. With severely lacking results, we organized both top down and bottom up approaches that would ideally meet in the middle to establish accountable and sustainable change. From the bottom up, we worked with students in applying a climate lens to existing curriculum by going through each session topic and noting both new objectives and evidence-based resources that can be used for future delivery of the lectures. Minimizing both additional lecture time and work for already overloaded lecturers was a priority. From the top down, we met with committees of deans to advocate for a standardized, accountable, and sustainable structure to ensure implementation of this curriculum throughout all 4 years. We knew the impacts of climate change on human health are an incredibly multidimensional issue to be contained in a single lecture or series. We know it needs to be infused in all aspects of medicine so we can optimize the health of our planet and the health of our patients. In the spring of 2023, our bottom up and top down approaches finally met in the middle. Our school approved a longitudinal curriculum theme, “Climate Change and Human Health,” that funds a faculty director and holds each course accountable to integrating content where appropriate. Now, serving MS4SF together, this achievement showed us that the power of trainee voices had no limits. With this momentum, we continue to advocate for more cohesive integration of climate change into patient healthcare.
Contributors
All authors contributed equally to ideation and writing of the paper.
Declaration of interests
The authors have no conflict of interests to report.