Abstract
In 2021, a woman in British Columbia (BC) was diagnosed with climate change (Labbe, 2021). This diagnosis reflects her physician’s grappling with the tension between two competing professional imperatives: the imperative to treat each individual patient and the imperative to address broader social causes of ill-health, whether conceived as the social determinants of health, structural determinants of health, or political ecologies of health. While this diagnosis was an exceptional and perhaps esoteric response to the climate crisis, it is emblematic of a change in role currently faced by health care providers. Climate change has been acknowledged as the predominant threat to human health by major health organizations such as the WHO (2021) as well as prominent health publications such as The Lancet, which has been publishing “countdown” reports on human health and climate change since 2016 (see for example Romanello et al. 2021). With the proliferation and amplification of such warnings, and as climate-related mortalities and morbidities arrive in greater numbers and closer to home, Canadian health care providers are necessarily changing their practices. My paper draws on my current study of how health care providers in British Columbia are changing their professional practice in relation to the climate crisis. I explore the changes that health care providers are implementing, how they conceive their role, and the barriers which they encounter.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
Technical, Political, and Social Responses
KEYWORDS
Physicians, Nurses, Climate, Sociology, Work, Advocacy, Practice
