Climate Change plans in Brighton

Hi I'm Elly - a 4th year student, studying Medicine at Brighton and Sussex Medical School, but currently taking a few years out to do a BSc in Pharmacology at the University of Brighton and work with Medsin-UK and Healthy Planet.

I have always had a desire to get involved with projects that allow me to play a small part in fighting injustice, which brought me to getting involved with the local student StopAIDS campaign. It was through working with StopAIDS I discovered Medsin, and was on the first local Medsin committee in Brighton. This lead to me being on the National Committee, and although I have enjoyed being on a governing body of a student Global Health network, and learnt so much, I have a real desire to be on the front lines now.

I understand the need for the layers in leadership, and bureaucracy, but while working within these areas it is easy to lose touch about why you are doing it.

I applied for this programme because selfishly I have a desire to learn more about Global Health, but I also want to be active in combating the inequalities.

As “climate change is the biggest threat to health in the 21st century”, it seems the most logical area to work in. As I am training to be a healthcare professional, it would be inefficient to be learning about disease pathology, if it is CC that will be the greatest cause of ill health. I know that as a clinician it is impossible to combat everything that ill affects health, but it would be immoral to not even consider combating climate change as our duty.

I have an active interest in Climate Change, and how we are going to combat, and prevent it. In particular I am interested in how the international arena has reacted to the notion of Climate Change; the economics, the politics and the policies.
I have wanted to be involved with a project that would allow me to really get involved with making an impact on the UK’s carbon output.

My personal interests lie within campaigning and policy, so it will be very interesting to use a different approach. In particular I wish to investigate the method of a top down approach; by working with management to establish methods of change, and implementing them. I believe that yes it is necessary to educate our peers, but that real change can only happen if it is implemented first by management.

Taking into account the co-benefits that sustainable development will have on the NHS, it is logical that management implement such changes, and with the government putting pressure on the trusts and mandating them to create SD plans, it appears that a top down approach would be most effective.

I am also interested in the clinical side as well, but because of my degree in pharmacology and my job in a local GP’s clinic, I felt that it made sense to work in these areas. As I work in the surgery a couple of days a week, and I understand the structure of the surgery well, I would like to create a 10 point plan to reduce the carbon footprint of the surgery. Similar to the one designed for Nephrology. I hope to create it early on in the programme, and then use it at the surgery, creating a case study that I may then be able to present to the RCGP’s conference. And if successful be used as an example for the all GP surgeries.

So my plan for the next few weeks:

• Contact local environmental groups, including our local Healthy Planet.
• Form a local group that I can work with
• Establish any work that has been done so far.

I am also really keen on education and PHEMS, and so have contacted my med school on how to set up an SSC and am looking into developing a proposal for that.

Well this is my first blog, so hopefully they will become a little bit more action packed as time goes on!!

Elly