Building on the success of its Physician Fellowship in Climate & Health, the University of Colorado School of Medicine is pleased to announce a new professional development program for health care providers of all specialties.
Government, nonprofit funding agencies, and hospital systems are scaling up climate and health opportunities. Health care providers must learn to lead on:
BECOME A LEADER IN THE CRITICAL HEALTH ISSUE OF OUR TIME.
Community leaders, deans, department chairs, elected officials, hospital CEOs, nonprofit executive directors, and government agencies will be tasked with climate plans. They will need expertise and counsel on the health impacts of their operations and
policies to benefit their constituencies and patients.
Our ecosystems are now under such stress that widescale human suffering is all but a certainty. Record heat exposures, flooding episodes, wildfires, hurricanes, and forced displacement are increasingly exacerbating health disparities, predominantly in our most vulnerable populations.
The first diplomate class at the National Center for Atmospheric Research
Diplomates in Climate Medicine will be credible, knowledgeable, and effective leaders on smart, patient-centric policies on this critical health crisis.
Few clinicians can effectively articulate the dizzy interplay between public health, energy policy, geopolitics, earth science, government, and medicine. Policy has stalled due to the difficulty in translating complex earth science into convincing connections between extreme heat and illness in urban communities, pandemics and loss of biodiversity, or severe weather and food insecurity.
Climate Medicine Diplomates can fill that gap, crafting patient-centric narratives when working with CEOs, community leaders, and policymakers by:
ALL PARTICIPANTS WILL RECEIVE A PRINTED COPY OF OUR TEXTBOOK, Global Climate Change and Human Health (2e) and a logo’ed CLIMATE MEDICINE fleece!
OUR PARTNERS
The Diploma in Climate Medicine is for the clinician concerned with the impacts of climate change on the health of our families, patients, and society. In this program, you will receive the hands-on training and professional credentials necessary to be a credible, knowledgeable, and influential voice in advancing smart, patient-centric policy in climate and health. Leadership opportunities on behalf of communities, health care systems, academic institutions, NGOs, governments, and policymakers are coming. This program will give you the background and skills to be an effective change agent.
The Diploma in Climate Medicine will offer the superlative distinction for expertise and leadership in this novel field.
The program has five separate one-week certificate program. Completion of all five certificates leads to the Diploma in Climate Medicine.
A carefully integrated curriculum permits participants to have a 360-degree, comprehensive perspective on the health impacts of climate change.
All courses include cross-cutting themes on climate justice, leadership, and climate & health communication.
We conduct each course in a hybrid fashion with the following components:
Each of the five courses (60 hours) will offer a professional certificate from the CU School of Medicine and may serve as a stand-alone course in that topic. Participants completing all five certificates (300 hours) will receive a Diploma in Climate Medicine from the CU School of Medicine. Courses do not need to be taken sequentially, but it is recommended that you start with Foundations and Updates in Climate Medicine.
This activity has been planned and implemented in accordance with the accreditation requirements and policies of the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME) through the joint partnership of the Wilderness Medical Society and University
of Colorado. The Wilderness Medical Society is accredited by the ACCME to provide continuing medical education for physicians.
The Wilderness Medical Society designates this educational activity for [maximum credit hours pending] AMA PRA Category 1 CreditsTM. Each physician should only claim credit commensurate with the extent of their participation in the activity
Please note, for those that wish to claim CME credits and certificate, there will be an additional fee of $150 per person per diploma course.
Upon completion of the program, participants will have gained:
Foundations and Updates in Climate Medicine | Fall 2022 September 25 - October 2, 2022 |
Developing Sustainable Hospital Systems | Spring 2023 Planned |
Disaster Response and Recovery | Fall 2023 Planned |
Community Resilience: Energy Innovation & Healthy Infrastructure | Spring 2024 Planned |
Global Challenges | Fall 2024 Planned |
Few
clinicians can effectively articulate the dizzy interplay between public health, energy policy, geopolitics, earth science, government and medicine. It is no underestimation that recent policy has stalled from the difficulty in translating complex
earth science into convincing linkages between extreme heat and illness in urban communities; loss of biodiversity and pandemics; or extreme weather and food insecurity.
Climate doctors can fill that gap, crafting patient-centric narratives when sparring over policies with CEOs, community leaders, and policymakers in advocating for climate-resilient policies; credibly addressing deeply rooted environmental justice issues; and effectively leading health systems to de-carbonize. This is where to begin — a solid foundation to build upon for your Diploma in Climate Medicine.
The
American health sector is responsible for an estimated 8.5% of national carbon emissions. Its full-cost operational footprint is enormous when considering facility operations, sources of energy use, and goods and services supply chains. We need health care
champions to implement cost-saving strategic investments through energy and waste efficiencies; "greener" operative practices; healthier food services; and smarter purchasing. All represent tangible opportunities for you to lead as a change agent,
both as a heavyweight within the American economy and as a care provider charged with the health and well-being of our communities.
Features of this course include:
Lancet
has called climate change the “biggest global health threat of the 21st century.” Consider that wildfires are more intense and longer lasting than ever before. We have suffered from months of persistent air degradation across huge swaths
of our country, resulting in untold illness. We have experienced flooding, structural damage and displacement from hurricanes, each year increasingly energized from warmer average temperatures. The data tell us that chaotic changes to our ecosystems
are undermining healthy living, exacerbating illness, and stressing social determinants of health. The list of climate-related health effects is no different than a busy emergency department triage list: fainting (from extreme heat), shortness of
breath (from degraded air quality and increased aeroallergens), fever (from vector-borne diseases), vomiting and diarrhea (from diminished water quality), and trauma (from extreme weather events). Understanding the root causes and responses to disasters
will be a crucial part of your DiCM experience.
Features of this course include:
Climate change is the result of the carbon economy, and if we seek to protect the health and wellness of our communities, the Diplomate in Climate Medicine will need to be facile in understanding basic concepts in energy choices and impacts down to the local, neighborhood, and individual level. There are few issues within climate change that are as entrenched with misinformation and obfuscation than energy use. As a DiCM, you can be a clarion voice for your community, schooled in basic concepts to advocate for and effect healthy energy policies.
Features of this course include:
The first four courses will give you a firm foundation on the health impacts of climate change: Heat stress (from extreme heat), dyspnea from degraded air quality and aeroallergen spikes, fevers from vector-borne diseases, vomiting and diarrhea from diminished water quality, and trauma from extreme weather events and increased civil discord. This final course will turn its lens toward international challenges and issues of global governance.
We’ll examine how climate change health impacts are exacerbated by poor governance in regions with little to no resiliency, stoking civil discord due to food and water insecurity from droughts that cause crop failures and food price spikes and kindle unrest.
We’ll examine how climate change has threatened human security through population displacement, violent conflict, and poverty entrenchment. We will dig deeper into how extreme heat events in Central America and Southeast Asia have been associated with chronic kidney failure in middle-aged agricultural workers. We will discuss climate models that predict that by 2050, simply being outside in the Middle East will be life-threatening. We will study forced displacement and start with the haunting resettlement map of diaspora from Hurricane Katrina as well as the low-lying Pacific island nations, which will be underwater by the year 2100.
Adding to this final synthesis, in partnership with the Council on Foreign Relations, we’ll dissect the many institutions, treaties, compacts and contracts of global governance, including the IPCC, COP conferences, historic protocols and treaties. We’ll touch upon concepts of geoengineering, and how “hail Mary” grand solutions could affect global health.
Final course in the diploma will feature a capstone project where you, as a future diplomate, will integrate these many lessons into a cumulative synthesis to share with faculty and peers.
Climate Medicine is a new concept in clinical care, and at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, we are defining it. The Climate & Health Program utilizes education, research, service, and partnerships to help build a sustainable community committed to climate health.
Our goal is to advance the capacity of all health care professionals to effect change in this critical health crisis. We can't think of a better endeavor for our creative energies, educational passion, and professional work. Our team believes the impact
of training leaders in climate and health will amplify our collective voice and influence policy change for years to come. We hope that Diploma in Climate Medicine graduates will become effective guardians against the burgeoning threat. We need formidable
innovators and leaders on this critical issue for all of humanity.
Our faculty are experts on climate change and human health unsurpassed among academic centers. We not only bring your our best talents, but pull from luminaries in the field to augment our faculty.
Jay Lemery, MD | Rosemary Rochford, PhD |
Terry O'Connor, MD | Bhargavi Chekuri, MD |
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![]() Amy Collins, MD, is an emergency medicine physician in the Boston suburbs and a sustainable health care professional. She founded the sustainability committee at MetroWest Medical Center in 2007 and led the sustainability efforts there for seven years. Under her leadership, MetroWest Medical Center received numerous Environmental Excellence Awards from Practice Greenhealth, including the Environmental Leadership Circle Award, the most prestigious award offered. She also worked as a sustainable health care consultant for Vanguard Health Systems and implemented sustainability programs at Vanguard’s 26 hospitals nationwide. She now serves as the medical director of Physician Engagement and Education at Health Care Without Harm leading their Physician Network, with a goal to support physicians and medical students who are interested in promoting environmentally responsible, climate-smart health care. She speaks internationally about the intersection between climate change, health and health care and the role of the health care sector in leading climate solutions. |
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![]() Caleb Dresser, MD, is an emergency physician at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston and an instructor at Harvard Medical School. He is assistant director of the Fellowship in Climate and Human Health at Harvard and is affiliated with the Harvard FXB Center for Health and Human Rights and the Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. His research focuses on understanding the health implications of climate-related disasters and human mobility, and he is actively involved in efforts to educate health care workers, policymakers, and the public about the value of action to protect human health in the context of the ongoing climate crisis. |
He now chairs the Community Medicine and Public Health Section of the National Medical Association - the largest and oldest national organization representing African American physicians and their patients in the United States. |
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Luber has served as co-chair of the Climate Change and Human Health Interagency Workgroup at the U.S. Global Change Research Program, a convening lead author for the third and fourth U.S. National Climate Assessments, and lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Fifth Assessment Report. |
In 2018, he was appointed a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and in 2020 he was awarded George Mason’s top research honor—the Beck Family Presidential Medal of Excellence in Research and Scholarship—and the Stephen H. Schneider Award for Outstanding Climate Science Communication. In 2021, Maibach was identified by Thompson Reuters as one of the world’s 10 most influential scientists working on climate change. He has served as associate director of the National Cancer Institute and worldwide director of social marketing at Porter Novelli. He earned his PhD in communication science at Stanford University, his master of public health at San Diego State University, and his bachelor’s in psychology at the University of California, San Diego. |
Mitchell has spent more than 20 years working in the public health sector, including as director of the Hartford Health Department and deputy director of the Kansas City Health Department. He spent 15 years working with environmental justice communities to prevent and reduce environmentally related disease, as well as to change policies that are detrimental to environmental health. Mitchell is the founder and senior policy advisor of the Connecticut Coalition for Environmental Justice. He has served on several U.S. EPA and FDA advisory committees and has received several awards for his community and environmental health leadership. Mitchell earned his bachelor’s and medical degrees from the University of Missouri-Kansas City and his master of public health degree from Johns Hopkins University. |
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![]() Moriah A. Washington, MPA, serves as director of community engagement at New York City Emergency Management, leading a team that collaborates with and engages community-based organizations in emergency preparedness and response. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she served as a co-leader for New York City’s Community Engagement Taskforce and Language Taskforce while also serving as a member of the newly chartered Racial Inclusion & Equity Taskforce. While at New York City Emergency Management, she established a new program, Strengthening Communities, to partnerwith community and faith-based networks as they learn and develop hyperlocal community emergency plans. Washington holds a bachelor’s degree in sociology from Berea College and a master’s in public administration from Baruch College. Prior to serving in the emergency management field, Washington served in the youth development sector as an educator, community organizer, and manager for more than 20 years. She is an alumna of AmeriCorps (City Year + Citizen Schools) and a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer. Washington has actively served in urban communities working with parents, schools, local leaders, and community organizers throughout her entire career. |
The Diploma in Climate Medicine is open to health care practitioners who hold an advanced degree and licensure in any area of clinical practice.
The diploma is awarded upon successful completion of all five certificates. You do not need to enroll in the diploma program to take an individual certificate course.
The four additional certificate courses will roll out over the subsequent 24 months. There is no time period within which the five certificate courses must be completed to be awarded a diploma.
We are now accepting applications on a rolling basis.
We are currently full for our second certification. If you are interested in being on a waiting list for future certifications or updates from our program, please fill in your information below.
The Diplomate Class at Rocky Mountain National Park
We will award three $900 scholarships to exceptional applicants who can attest to need (see application details below).
A
$500 refundable deposit is required with your application. The final
payment is due 45 days prior to the start of the certificate course.
Participants applying for subsequent programs in pursuit of a diploma will be eligible for a 10% discount from the single certificate course tuition fee.
To prepare your application for submission, please have the following documents available:
Participants applying for subsequent programs will not be required to re-submit application documents. In the event of limited spots for a single certificate course offering, preference will be given to returning participants seeking a diploma.
Students can expect to hear a decision on their application within four weeks. For questions regarding your application, please email Breanna.McKercher@cuanschutz.edu.
Your deposit will be refundable if you are not accepted and up to 3 months before the certificate course start.
Should the program be canceled due to insufficient enrollment, a full refund will be given. Notification of cancellation will be provided at least 45 days prior to the program’s start date.
We regret that we are unable to provide refunds should an applicant register then be unable to attend the program.
For all inquiries regarding the Diploma in Climate Medicine, please email Breanna.McKercher@cuanschutz.edu.