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 application cycle for the 2025 cohort is now open! Learn more and submit a pre-application here.
What our 2024 Fellowship Teams have done:
Kaiser Santa Rosa Family Medicine (Michelle Mertz MD, Rachel Friedman MD, Lynn Lamb PsyD, Emily Baker NP, Shannon McDermott PhD)
Project: Healthy Food in Health Care
We are faculty at Kaiser Permanente Santa Rosa’s Family Medicine Residency and have a mission to be a climate-forward residency program. We are comprised of family medicine physicians, one clinical psychologist, one nurse practitioner, and one full- time PhD-level Research Project Manager. Both Dr. Mertz and Dr. Friedman have given lectures locally and nationally about environmental health, advocacy, and the importance of food systems change to the health of our people and planet.
Summary of our project:
Kaiser Permanente has pledged on their website to source all food locally or sustainably by 2025. This project aims to move this goal forward by improving the sustainability of food provided at the Kaiser Permanente Santa Rosa Medical Center. We hope to become a model for institutional change and community education regarding a sustainable, healthy food system. Our project initially identified obstacles towards local and sustainable food sourcing and collected data on current ordering practices of patients. We are working to restructure the patient menu toward a plant-forward menu in hopes to influence patients to choose plant-forward options. We are also working on removing beef from the rotation of house meals (and removing beef altogether). We will add information on the climate/health impacts of a plant-forward diet on the dietary channel in patient rooms.
Abhinav Gupta, MD (UCSD)
Project: Appropriate Management of Waste in Pain Procedure Suites
Leila Hebshi, MD (Kaiser East Bay)
Project: Scope 3 Reduction Initiative in the Operating Room
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.