Health Care Providers and Climate Change Action

There has been a proliferation of calls to action for the health care sector to participate in climate change mitigation and adaptation. Such calls invoke health impacts, health sector emissions, and the trusted position of health care providers as messengers. Whether and how such work is supported in health care systems and how health care staff can take up the call, however, varies, with most health systems at a relatively nascent stage of climate-related action.

I undertook qualitative research in British Columbia, Canada. This region has faced numerous climate-related extreme weather events with major health impacts, most notably in 2021, when a heat dome led to an unprecedented death toll. I interviewed 19 doctors and nurses who are active on climate-related issuess about how they became active, their climate-related actions, how they understand their work, and forms of barriers and support that they faced.

I share cases of climate change engagement among physicians and nurses, exploring their work in relation to professional norms and values. In addition to trust of the public, frequently identified as a feature of health professions, other material and discursive conditions of health care workers’ professional lives uniquely shape their work in climate change action. I examine how various norms and discourses of the health professional role interact with climate action, shaping possibilities and constraints for climate action. Framings of the crisis, including planetary health and one health, also interact with the forms of action taken.

This research focuses on the experiences of health care workers in a high-income country with universal health care. I will share interventions that are replicable in other settings and invite discussion on how context-specific health system factors in various settings facilitate or constrain climate-change related action by health care workers, drawing on my expertise of health systems in low-income settings.