Planetary Health: Sharing in Our Collective Humanity as Nurses to Care for Mother Earth.

Presently of 12 months, we rely our blessings and mirror on aspirations for the approaching new 12 months. As caring professionals, I invite you to pause momentarily to contemplate this text stuffed with a heart-centered message. Our career remains to be therapeutic from a pandemic and dealing with challenges equivalent to burnout, trauma, violence, and staffing. We’re sturdy but fragile; decided but susceptible. Inside this duality, we come collectively by organizational connection to search out our method ahead to honor ourselves and our work, present protected care to others, and nurture these coming into nursing.

With this in thoughts, it’s exhausting to think about that our career would wish to concentrate on one other risk affecting human wellbeing: Considered one of local weather breakdown throughout the globe, leading to environmental degradation and disastrous climate occasions. Planetary Well being is a rising transdisciplinary discipline the place nurses can have a pivotal position in schooling, prevention, coverage change, and bettering the well being of all (all which means people, households, communities, the earth, and its ecosystems). Planetary well being is solution-oriented, and a social motion centered on addressing human disruption to earth’s pure methods and the impacts to human well being (Planetary Well being Alliance, 2023).

Planetary well being broadly contains the domains of local weather change, biogeochemical cycles, modifications in land use, arable land and soil, water shortage, biodiversity loss, and air pollution. Well being penalties could embrace malnutrition, water shortage, exacerbation of continual illness, infectious illness, allergic reactions, temperature-related results, disruptions to psychological well being, civil strife, inhabitants displacement, and social injustice (Myers & Frumkin, 2020). For instance, in Colorado, wildfires, drought, and air high quality are main well being and environmental considerations.

Though modifications in our local weather have led to break that’s irreversible in some methods, there’s hope that collective consciousness, consideration, and motion can lead us towards a more healthy path. And the excellent news is that nurses needn’t add something additional to their plates. We merely do what we do within the trusted and caring method that we do it. The important thing, I consider, is to broaden the care that we presently present so faithfully to incorporate all dwelling beings. This growth begins with connecting ourselves with nature and getting in contact with how that makes us really feel inside. In Colorado, there are breathtaking locations to immerse ourselves within the magnificence and therapeutic that nature offers.

Of their theoretical dialogue, Kalogirou, Olson, and Davidson (2020) recommend that nurses have various ranges of data associated to local weather change and that local weather change is seen extra as a private concern moderately than knowledgeable problem. Nurses are taught to concentrate on the atmosphere with particular person sufferers, however there’s a lack of readability on the nurse’s position in a broader sense. Just lately, the American Nurses Affiliation (2023) revealed a place assertion recognizing local weather change as a essential public well being problem, encouraging nurses to combine their information concerning local weather and well being to handle affected person wants. By increasing our worldview and incorporating indigenous information, we will transfer towards co-creating a cultural change to information us by these difficult local weather instances. Drawing on the empowerment of every of us statewide, we will collaborate with different disciplines to maneuver consciously towards transitioning to a more healthy planet, moderately than dread or concern.

On this new 12 months, allow us to ponder utilizing our shared humanity as nurses to broaden our caring presence to Mom Earth, resulting in fairness and a more healthy future for all who inhabit right here. I encourage you to contemplate your presents and the way they is likely to be utilized in 2024 to take care of our valuable planet. Under are assets to study extra.

Assets

Alliance of Nurses for Wholesome Environments (ANHE)

https://envirn.org/

Well being Care with out Hurt

https://noharm.org/

Nationwide Institute of Environmental Well being Providers: Local weather Change and Human Well being

https://www.niehs.nih.gov/analysis/packages/climatechange/index.cfm

Follow Greenhealth

https://practicegreenhealth.org/

The Lancet Countdown on Well being and Local weather Change

https://www.thelancet.com/countdown-health-climate?dgcid=google_ppc_search_climatecountdown22_usa&utm_term=lancetpercent20planetpercent20health&utm_campaign=CAMPAIGN+

U.S. Division of Well being and Human Providers: Workplace of Local weather Change and Well being Fairness (OCCHE)

https://www.hhs.gov/climate-change-health-equity-environmental-justice/index.html

References

American Nurses Affiliation. (2023, September 8). Nurses’ position in addressing world local weather change, local weather justice, and well being. https://www.nursingworld.org/practice-policy/nursing-excellence/official-position-statements/id/climate-change/

Kalogirou, M., Olson, J., & Davidson, S. (2020). Nursing’s metaparadigm, local weather change and planetary well being. Nursing Inquiry. https://doi.org/10.1111/nin.12356

Myers, S. & Frumkin, H. (2020). Planetary well being: Defending nature to guard ourselves. Island Press.

Planetary Well being Alliance (2023). What’s planetary well being? https://www.planetaryhealthalliance.org/planetary-health

Mitzie R. Meyers PhD, RN, CNE, AHN-BC

Mitzie Meyers has served on a nationwide Planetary Well being Activity Power for the previous two years. She additionally works with the World Consortium on Local weather and Well being Training to develop instructional supplies for nurses. As a nurse educator, she incorporates planetary well being ideas into nursing programs and curricula, particularly in her scientific observe space of pediatrics.