Healthcare Sustainability Fellowship
The Healthcare Sustainability Fellowship is intended to support healthcare workers with personalized mentorship to complete sustainability projects at their workplaces throughout the course of one to two years.
Our 2025 Fellowship teams:
Emily Baker, NP and Michelle Mertz, MD - Healthy Food in Healthcare (Kaiser Santa Rosa)
Thea Spitzer, PhD - Assisting A California-based Health Organization in Mitigating Effects of Climate Change: Thea Spitzer
Reverend Talitha Aho, Carol Fonseca, MD, Amanda Millstein, MD, and Hilary Ong, MD - Green Care: Reducing Glove Waste in Pediatric Hospitals (UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospitals)
Our inaugural 2024 Fellowship teams:
Emily Baker, NP, Rachel Friedman, MD, Lynn Lamb, PsyD, Shannon McDermott PhD, Michelle Mertz, MD - Healthy Food in Health Care (Kaiser Santa Rosa)
Abhinav Gupta, MD - Appropriate Management of Waste in Pain Procedure Suites (UCSD)
Leila Hebshi, MD - Scope 3 Reduction Initiative in the Operating Room (Kaiser East Bay)
The healthcare industry is supposed to be dedicated to improving the health of people. But US healthcare contributes 8-10% of national greenhouse gas emissions, and the average US hospital generates 6.5 tons of waste every day. If we truly care about our patients, we need to clean up our act.
This year, Climate Health Now inaugurated a Healthcare Sustainability Fellowship, to provide guidance to individuals or teams to complete projects in their own workplaces to improve environmental sustainability. The fellows learn how to plan a doable project, gain approval from administrative leaders, recruit operational staff to implement their recommendations, convince stakeholders to change entrenched habits, and measure outcomes. It is expected that the experience gained will propel these fellows to become leaders of environmental stewardship in their institutions.
We appreciate any donations to provide our fellows with a modest stipend to support their attendance at Clean Med, the annual national healthcare sustainability educational meeting, and an annual CHN meeting where the fellows will share the results of their projects and learn from one another. These stipends will be funded via tax-deductible contributions from members and the public.
Healthcare Sustainability Slack Workspace
We are excited to announce the launch of CHN's Healthcare Sustainability Slack Workspace - to create a place for CHN members interested in and working on healthcare sustainability to share information, connect, and collaborate to bring more projects to life and make real change.
This discussion space has opportunities to connect based on type of project (e.g., energy, waste, inhalers), type of health setting (e.g., inpatient, outpatient), and specific systems (e.g., Kaiser). If you are interested in joining the conversation and collaborating with like-minded colleagues within your workplace and across health systems, please email connect@climatehealthnow.org for an invitation to join.