The Millennium Project: the positive health implications of improved environmental sustainability

Sustainability: an evolutionary concept analysis. Exploring nursing's role within the sustainability movement

AIM

This paper aimed to explore the evolution of the concept of sustainability to facilitate further knowledge development in the discipline of nursing.

BACKGROUND

The concept of 'sustainability' emerged in the 1950s as a result of the environmental movement. The concept has been adapted by the discipline of management and is increasingly discussed in the context of health care. The concept remains ambiguous in the discipline of nursing, resulting in a struggle to articulate the role of nursing in the sustainability movement.

DESIGN

Rodgers evolutionary method of concept analysis was used.

DATA SOURCES

Literature was searched from 1987-2011, including English, peer reviewed texts in the databases CINAHL and ABI/INFORM global. Two book chapters and grey literature were also included.

REVIEW METHODS

References were read and analysed according to antecedents, attributes, consequences, surrogate terms and related terms.

RESULTS

Defining antecedents, attributes and consequences highlight the complexity and diversity of the concept. Attributes include: sustainability as a condition of change, as process, as outcome, as dependent of multiple stakeholders, and as social consciousness. 'Sustainability' is a fragile concept highly dependent on the processes and stakeholders involved in its fruition. There is a distinct difference in the level of concept clarity between the disciplines of management and nursing.

CONCLUSIONS

The complexities associated with the concept of 'Sustainability' have led to its ambiguity. Nursing must, however, work to further clarify the concept to fully understand nursing's potential role in the sustainability movement.

Perspective: Environment, biodiversity, and the education of the physician of the future

Ours is an age of unprecedented levels of environmental alteration and biodiversity loss. Beyond the exposure to environmental hazards, conditions such as environmental degradation, biotic impoverishment, climate change, and the loss of ecosystem services create important health threats by changing the ecology of many pathogens and increasing the incidence and/or severity of certain noncommunicable conditions. They also threaten health in the future by weakening the Earth's life support systems.Although physicians remain one of the most often accessed and most trusted sources of information about the environment, there is currently little emphasis on educating medical professionals about these environmental issues. This lack of training reduces the ability of most physicians to be efficient science-public interfaces and makes them ineffective at contributing to address the fundamental causes of environmental problems or participate in substantive environmental policy discussions. This is an important challenge facing medical education today.To turn medical students into effective physician-citizens, an already-overwhelmed medical school curriculum must make way for a thoughtful exploration of environmental stressors and their impacts on human health. The overarching question before medical educators is how to develop the competencies, standards, and curricula for this educational endeavor. To this end, the authors highlight some of the critical linkages between health and the environment and suggest a subset of key practical issues that need to be addressed in order to create environmental education standards for the physician of the future.