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Educational Resource: Mapping Climate Change and Health into the Medical Curriculum

Educational Resource: Mapping Climate Change and Health into the Medical Curriculum

Co-development of a ‘Planetary Health-Organ System Map’ for Graduate Medical Education 

It is imperative that educating the medical workforce to understand, address and mitigate the health effects of climate change is integrated into all levels of medical education. 

DEA medical students and doctors co-developed a curriculum resource that maps climate change and health to the classically used organ-system teaching structure

It is an easy-to-use tool for medical educators to locate clinically relevant teaching points in each major body system 

Mapping climate change and health into the medical curriculum: co-development of a “planetary health-organ system map” for graduate medical education

Click the below image to access the map

Planetary health-organ system map – a curriculum resource for medical educators

Includes: 

  • Curriculum Mapping Framework and Methodology 
  • Organ System Mapping
    • Cardiovascular System
    • Respiratory System
    • Renal System
    • Gastrointestinal System
    • Neuroscience
    • Reproduction
    • Intersystem
  • Healthcare’s Ecological Footprint
  • The Role of Medical Students
  • Opportunities for Applied Skills and Behaviours

This slide deck (link opens and downloads PowerPoint presentation) has been created to enable medical educators to easily incorporate clinically relevant teachings on climate change and health into existing educational materials. Educators teaching on specific topics can quickly locate key concepts relative to organ systems, slot the slide into their presentation, and refer to the Mapping Climate Change and Health into the Medical Curriculum resource for further information.

We invite all medical educators, including at Prevocational and Medical Specialty College levels, to incorporate this resource in your curricula  DEA has an active group of members with a specific interest in medical education. We would love to hear about your progress and are already working to incorporate more organ systems. We welcome your input, feedback and would be happy to advise on integration within your curriculum  – contact us at admin@dea.org.au 

You are free to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format, particularly for educational and non-profit services, so long as you attribute Doctors for the Environment Australia and the authors. Citation: Burch H, Watson B, Simpson G, Beaton L. J, Maxwell J, Winkel K. Mapping climate change and health into the medical curriculum: co-development of a “planetary health-organ system map” for graduate medical education. Melbourne, Australia: Doctors for the Environment Australia; 2021. 

Central to the work was the application of three models to identify and explore the relationships between broad public and planetary health content, and person-centred biophysiological mechanisms. The team’s open-access article, published in the Medical Journal of Australia, provides further methodological detail.

Click here to access the publication

Burch H, Beaton LJ, Simpson G, Watson B, Maxwell J, Winkel KD. A planetary health–organ system map to integrate climate change and health content into medical curricula. The Medical Journal of Australia. 2022 Nov;217(9):469.

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