The NYU Meyers College of Nursing plans to launch a course related to climate and environmental health this fall.
The course, initially meant to launch in the spring of 2020, is called the Environment and Health of Populations and will include approximately nine modules. The first third will focus on the natural environment, the second third on the built environment and its impacts on occupational health and the last third on climate change. The course will be an elective and available to both nursing and undergraduate students, the school told Fierce Healthcare.
The school already has several related courses, including on the clinical relevance of climate change in healthcare decision-making. The goal with the latest course is to prepare nurses to better care for patients and address social determinants of health.
“Students are hungry to have these deeper conversations,” NYU Meyers clinical associate professor Robin Klar, R.N., DNSc, told Fierce Healthcare. “The students get it on another whole level.”
NYU is among 52 others participating in the Nurses Climate Challenge, led by Health Care Without Harm and the Alliance of Nurses for Healthy Environments. It’s a national effort to educate 50,000 healthcare workers on the impacts of climate change by 2022.
Klar, whose nursing background is in community health, has devoted much of her career to studying environmental health. While climate has always been changing, it has become more visible in the past 20 years. “It got invisible for a while, but it’s back,” she said. She suspects part of the reason it went largely unnoticed for some time was because of the distractions of advancing health sciences and an increased provider workload.
Though nurses have the most facetime with patients and therefore have the biggest opportunity to understand their health, “we can get distracted by a million different conversations,” Klar said. They may not think to ask patients questions about social determinants of health “unless it’s, like, right in your face,” she added. Understanding social drivers is critical to preventive care, which is about “keeping people well instead of having people get ill and then manage that from a secondary and tertiary perspective.” However, Klar noted, the U.S. has historically not really prioritized primary prevention. NYU is hopeful that these sorts of courses can train the next generation of nurses who will prioritize actively engaging with this issue.
Sometimes, talking about climate change can feel hopeless, Klar said. But emphasizing that individual changes can still have an impact is important. Providers may not feel equipped to address certain social drivers in patients, like testing for lead in their home — but they can refer patients to community organizations that do home assessments.
Engaging in the Nurses Climate Challenge has provided the school with resources and partners, facilitating an exchange of information and a broadening of perspectives on environmental health and climate change. Klar thinks others should be aiming to do the same.
“Don’t stay in your own corner of the world — jump outside, take a risk,” Klar said.