Virginia Research Day 2025

Medical Student Research Education and Simulation

05 Attitudes Towards Heat and Health in Medical Student Education

Anna Liles, MPH; Harsha Bhagtani, MD; Camron Johnson-Privitera, DO Corresponding author: aliles@vcom.edu

Edward Via College of Osteopathic Medicine

shaped their medical practice. Students completed a Pre-Survey, then immediately following the talk, a Post-intervention Survey on a voluntary basis. The survey assessed students’ attitudes about the role of warming global temperatures in their medical education. Results: Comparing the pre-survey and post survey results we saw an increase in students marking “strongly agree” to all prompts. With regard to students’ attitudes towards environmental health and education, 69% of students marked that they strongly agree that they would like warming global temperatures included in their medical school curriculum, after watching the talk. After the talk 93% of students indicated that they strongly agreed that they expect to see rising global temperatures affect their patients in clinical practice.

Background: With the presence of climate change, the need for inclusion of environmental education has become more apparent. Rising temperatures and changing climate patterns influence disease ecology and epidemiology.1 Understanding these impacts will be greatly beneficial for medical students as they begin their practice.2 Through an educational intervention, we aimed to increase students’ knowledge of the environmental impacts on human health and assess the students’ interest in further education. Methods: This QI project introduced medical students at the Edward Via College of Osteopathic Medicine to the impact of the environment on medical practice. The intervention in this project was an environmental health-focused talk, given by a practicing pediatrician. The talk detailed their experiences of how the climate and environment have

Conclusion: These results demonstrate that this issue is important to medical students and there is interest in highlighting it in the medical school curriculum. Resources: 1. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (n.d.). Effects of climate change on health. https://www.cdc.gov/climate-health/php/ effects/?CDC_AAref_Val 2. Greenwald, L., Blanchard, O., Hayden, C., & Sheffield, P. (2023). Climate and health education: A critical review at one medical school. Frontiers in public health, 10, 1092359. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2022.1092359

34