NH Climate Health Action Talk
NH CHAT
October, 2023
Scroll to Read:
Annual Meeting and Our Impacts
Mindfulness in Life Opportunity
Fundraising
Sustainability Corner: How NH hospitals can make a difference NOW
Quarterly Challenge
Most Recent LTE
Corporate Sponsors
On Wednesday, October 21st, members of NH Healthcare Workers for Climate Action met for our 2nd Annual Meeting and Dinner Party! At this event we were able celebrate our accomplishments over the initial 2 years of NH HWCA and set goals for our future.
Over the past 2 years, thanks to all of your support, together we have accomplished:
Growing our mailing list to unite a coalition of 2,845 healthcare professionals and others across NH and beyond.
Hosted 45 webinars with local and national experts on climate and health, totaling about 1,500 attendees, with over 120 people receiving continuing education credits.
Conducted 80 Speakers Bureau Climate and Health presentations given to a variety of audiences, using the trusted voice of healthcare workers to raise awareness of the impacts of climate on health.
Published about 60 Op-Eds and LTEs in media outlets around the state.
Almost 30,000 visits to nhclimatehealth.org have spread our messaging around the state.
Distributed several hundred children’s climate and health posters to pediatric offices, schools, libraries and more across the state and beyond, with a QR code to climate and health resources for families on our website.
Completed two Project ECHOs: Climate and Health Towards Climate Informed Care & Advocacy, and Connecting Mental Health, Climate Justice, and Nature.
Published, “Case study: The rapid growth of an interdisciplinary statewide climate and health movement” in The Journal of Climate Change and Health.
Collaborating with 36 affiliate healthcare or climate advocacy organizations.
Launched the Climate Informed Pediatric Care project.
Launched the Climate and Health Initiative for Children in Kearsarge and Sunapee project after receiving a grant from Dartmouth’s Center for Advancing Rural Health Equity.
Presented “Building Transdisciplinary Collaborations for Planetary Health, Equity, and Climate Justice” at the National Association of Social Workers NH Chapter 2022 Justice, Equity, Diversity & Inclusion Conference.
Presented, “Active Living, Syndemics, and Planetary Health: The Path Towards Climate Justice” oral presentation, and “A Syndemic Approach to Reducing Risk After COVID in Rural and Urban Places: Lessons for Prevention” poster presentation at the 2023 Active Living Conference at the National Institutes of Health.
The nursing education group worked to align climate and health curriculum with the new AACN essentials and the 2023 NCLEX standards, and presented the tailored Speakers Bureau presentation to various nursing schools around the state.
Participated in the Medical Society Consortium of Climate and Health’s Annual Meeting and Hill Day and advocated for stronger air quality standards with NH elected officials.
Created and distributed, “A Brief Guide to Individual Therapy for Climate-Related Mental Distress”
Proposed a bill to reestablish a NH DHHS Office of Climate and Health.
Members of the Policy & Advocacy Working Group testified in several public hearings, highlighting the health impacts of many climate and environmental bills.
Sponsored 2 press conferences, urging NH elected officials for climate and health solutions.
An Introduction to Mindfulness in Life
Margaret Fletcher, who gave a webinar on mindfulness for us in January 2023 is offering a 3 session, more intensive follow-up course specifically for the NHHWCA. This will be given some time after mid-November via ZOOM on Tuesdays 6:30-7:30 PM. If you are interested and can make a commitment to attend this series, please register with Emily Thompson at ethompson@nhclimatehealth.org.
Mindfulness is the practice of attending to life just as it is and relating skillfully with life’s challenges and joys. This practice may be just what’s needed to help you face into and navigate the particular stressors of the world we inhabit now. Through developing moment-by-moment awareness, we can access wisdom, well-being, and the wholeness we each carry. With practice, more joy, presence and steadiness in your life might be just one breath away.
This series consists of 3 one-hour classes and will include sitting, movement and goodwill meditations. We’ll explore these practices together in small and large group discussions, to strengthen awareness skills and share the wisdom gained through practice. Between sessions, you’ll engage with a formal 15-minute recorded meditation practice as well as informal instructions in your daily life.
Join Margaret Fletcher for this 3-week introduction to mindfulness. Margaret Fletcher trained and certified through University of Massachusetts Medical School’s Center for Mindfulness (UMASS CFM) to deliver Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) and other mindfulness-based programs. Margaret served as senior teacher and senior teacher-trainer at UMASS CFM until its closing in 2019. She is a co-founder of East Coast Mindfulness, a fully online home for mindfulness programs and MBSR teacher training. Margaret is an advisor to the BESS Family Foundation Eco-Dharma Advisory Board, a group committed to leading efforts at the intersection of mindfulness/meditation and the environmental impact of climate change and biodiversity loss. To learn more about Margaret, visit: https://www.eastcoastmindfulness.com/Margaret-Fletcher/.
Support our Annual Fund Campaign!
Help us reach our $25,000 Goal
In early November you will receive an appeal to support NH Healthcare Workers for Climate Action’s 2023 Annual Fund Campaign. The Campaign is our most important funding source. It represents the critical unrestricted operating support we need each year to thrive and grow. It is also the aspirational funding that gives us confidence to take action and find new ways forward in support of climate solutions. If you want to take immediate action on climate change, we hope you will join an anonymous donor that recently stepped-up with a very generous $10,000 matching gift. Given the donor’s deep commitment to our mission, every dollar you give up to $10,000 will be matched dollar for dollar. Working at the intersection of climate and health, there has never been a greater need across New Hampshire for action on climate and health. We hope you, too, will step up and make a gift to our Annual Fund Campaign and help us meet our $25,000 goal.
THE SUSTAINABILITY CORNER: How NH Hospitals can make a difference NOW
US healthcare accounts for 27% of global healthcare carbon emissions, despite serving only 4% of the globe’s population. Clearly, we can do more to reduce our share. One area ripe for improvement is transportation: transit of employees to and from work, patients requiring outpatient visits and testing, couriers for our lab specimens, and hospital owned vehicles.
According to the EPA, greenhouse gas emissions from transportation account for about 29% of total US greenhouse gas emissions, making it the largest single contributor to US greenhouse gas emissions.
Hospitals are major community employers, and bring a large number of employees in for shift work. It is time to encourage hospitals to incentivize alternative commuting practices. One example is Seattle Children’s Hospital, whose most common admission is pediatric asthma, a condition greatly exacerbated by vehicle exhaust.* Between 1995 and 2015 they were able to reduce their employees' single occupancy vehicle rate from 73% to 38%. Here in New Hampshire, many hospital employees cannot afford to live in the population center where their hospital is located. At the same time, our hospitals are spending a lot of money trying to recruit and retain employees. Wouldn’t it be smart to offer shuttle services from area park-and-ride lots closer to affordable housing communities, ideally using electric vehicles? If you were choosing which hospital to work for, wouldn’t you favor the one committed to sustainability who saved you money on gas, gave you a restful commute, and maybe allowed your family to get by with only one car?
Other areas that can be optimized include number and route of courier trips for lab specimens, and the number of trips patients must make for testing and pre-procedure evaluations, services that can be offered from satellite locations and their local physicians’ offices. Talk to your Hospital. Find out how much they are spending on recruitment and retention. Find out when they will be replacing vehicles in their fleet, and if they will be choosing electric. Find out if their satellite services and pre-op testing protocols make travel by patients to the hospital as efficient as possible.
Together, we can make a difference.
Paul Friedrichs MD
*During the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, traffic restrictions led to a 23% decrease in peak a.m. traffic. Ground level ozone levels decreased by 28%, and ER visits by children with asthma decreased by 42%, while ER visits for causes other than asthma did not change. JAMA 2001: 285: 897-905.
Quarterly Challenge
This is the first of our quarterly challenges to our group members to do and share one small activity that benefits our climate and health. I think of these tasks as "Rethinking, Refusing, Reusing, and Recycling" challenges. They help us understand at a grass roots level what will be involved in making systemic worldwide change: Think Global, Act Local. Here is some background on our first challenge.
Sources estimate we average 83 plastic bags per year per every man, woman and child on the planet. That's 500 billion plastic bags. How is that possible? And let's face it, some of us are using 2-3 times that per year while others are using only a handful. Plastic bags kill an estimated 100,000 marine animal each year by entanglement and ingestion, they release toxins into groundwater from landfill sites, they stay in the environment for hundreds of years while they break down, they get into the food chain through animals that ingest micro particles, and they produce greenhouse gasses both during the initial production as well as the end of life processes. To clarify, the stages of the plastics life cycle that produce greenhouse gas emissions include extraction, refining, manufacturing, and the end of life stages of incineration, recycling, landfill and environmental pollution. By 2030, the plastics life cycle processes combined are estimated to produce the equivalent of the annual emissions of 295 fully operational coal plants. That's about 1.34 gigatonnes of CO2e. (carbon dioxide equivalents of greenhouse gas) 1 gigatonne is roughly 200 million elephants! That's just crazy. Also, tiny particles of plastic called "microplastics" are everywhere to include being found in human blood, lung, GI tract, placentas, stool and breast milk. How they will ultimately impact our health is still being investigated but estimated to disrupt our endocrine function in such a manner as to have potential links to cancer, obesity, infertility, neurodevelopment, and many other diseases.
Here is our October challenge:
All members of the New Hampshire Health Care Workers for Climate Action and readers of the NH CHAT are challenged to not use plastic bags at the grocery store. Bring cloth bags to use instead. Or, if driving, don’t use bags at all, just unpack your groceries from your cart into sustainable, reusable boxes in your car. Do this for one month and then email me at ethompson@nhclimatehealth.org with your experiences. I will reply to everyone's messages with encouragement, ideas and thank you's!
Darla Thyng, MD
Hollis, NH
Rethinking, Refusing, Reusing, and Recycling!
PS. If you live in the Upper Valley, you can look at the Lebanon Co-op for one of the 1,000 free organic-cotton mesh bags being sewn by the Mesh Bag Mamas and use them for your produce instead of plastic bags.
Thank you so much to the corporate sponsors of NH Healthcare Workers for Climate Action, sponsoring this issue of the NH CHAT.
