Education for Sustainable Healthcare – Implementation challenges and potential solutions in 2025

Finley Ullom

Tuesday 1 July 2025

On 24 March 2025, Professor Jonathan Issberner, Professor of Medical Education and Lead for Sustainability in Medicine,  attended the Medical Schools Council Education for Sustainable Healthcare Conference. This event was the first annual meeting of the Medical Schools Council Education for Sustainable Healthcare Alliance.

These were his four principal take-aways from the conference:

1. Climate change is significant and ongoing and there is an urgent need for action, particularly in medicine
2. Teaching students as well as practicing medics to adopt sustainable practice is key
3. Advocacy and activism are both requirements to kickstart behavioural change in our institutions.  Advocacy as leaders who can provide guidance, sponsorship, and advise to others; and activism in demonstrating better ways to live on the planet and to actively take opportunity to evangelise and foreground sustainability
4. Things that facilitate change are
   1. Senior management, institutional, and governing body buy-in
   2. An appropriate annual budget
   3. Time provision in workload to do the work
   4. Faculty training in broader aspects of the environmental and sociological impacts of current medical practice using the UN 17 SDG’s as a framework.

You can read this full report on the conference here – Summary of USHMSCA Conference.