Given its longstanding commitments reducing morbidity and mortality and achieving social justice, public health is well-placed to act at individual, societal, and global level to protect planetary health. All allied health professionals should share these professional goals (Horton et al., 2014; Wabnitz et al., 2020)
General practitioners and primary care physicians should implement planetary health practices through ensuring that their businesses employ green and sustainable practices, and advocating for behaviors and lifestyles among their patients and communities that promote planetary health. At individual level, pursue lifestyles that limit climate impact, encourage networks to do so, and support political causes that align with planetary health. As a physician, counsel patients to prepare for climate change, adopt lifestyles that mitigate their own impact. As a professional body, state a unified position on climate change and planetary health and advocate for policies that mitigate adverse impacts. (Kemple, 2019; Pendrey, Beaton, & Kneebone, 2020; Xie et al., 2018)
Physicians should include planetary health principles as part of education. Calls for reducing impact of health care industry through decarbonization. (Silverman, 2019; Veidis et al., 2019)
Nurses should adopt a social justice lens and embrace planetary health principles to better align professional goals and objectives with addressing social determinants of health. (Rosa and Upvall, 2019)
Public health education should include courses that prepare trainees for addressing climate change. (Silverman, 2019)
Allied health professionals should pledge their commitment to planetary health, analogous to pledges of the Hippocratic Oath taken by physicians (Wabnitz et al., 2020)
Global surgery argues that climate change will lead to greater demand for surgical services. There is a need for the profession to consider how climate disasters will impact ability to deliver high quality surgical care. Surgical programs should adopt sustainability practices in delivering care by reusing equipment when possible, advocate for planetary health policies, support research on sustainable surgical practice, and advocate for reducing emissions in the health care system (Roa et al., 2020)
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