Many GP practices are keen to become more sustainable in their clinical and non-clinical practice, but lack the time or headspace to achieve this. Meanwhile, improvement of the medical school curriculum to include education on the most significant health threat of the century, is urgently needed. A project in Sheffield aims to address both these issues.
Greener Practice South Yorkshire’s local meeting on Thur 5th May focused on Sheffield Medical School’s Student Selected Component 4th year project, in which students spend a 6 week placement supporting practices to complete actions in the Green Impact for Health (GIfH) Toolkit. The project is now running very successfully, and there has been interest in replicating this work in other medical schools. Dr Honey Smith delivered a short presentation describing the project, along with medical students who have completed the project.
Greener Practice meetings involve a Thinking Time question which gave people the opportunity to consider the question: How might the scope, reach (including to other areas) and effectiveness of medical student delivery of the GIfH toolkit be further improved, both as a learning activity for the students, and as a means of delivering carbon reduction and sustainability actions to practices?