2024 SGEA Regional Meeting

Gaurab Basu, M.D., MPH 
Assistant Professor
Harvard Medical School

Medical Education and Climate Change: Preparing our students to protect our patients

Climate change has been described as the greatest threat to health we have faced as a society by the American Public Health Association. Climate change can impact our health through numerous mechanisms including heat-related disease, food insecurity, water scarcity, infectious diseases, air quality, extreme weather events, and impacts on mental health. Increasingly, U.S.-based medical schools are considering how to implement curricula to help medical students understand the implications of climate change on the practice of medicine. In this talk, Dr. Basu will present educational innovation of a longitudinal, integrated, required climate change, environment and health curricular theme at Harvard Medical School.

Neil Mehta, M.D.
Professor of Medicine and Associate Dean for Curricular Affairs
Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine of CWRU

Large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT have revolutionized the way we interact with text and information in various domains of our lives. Their remarkable ability to generate coherent and human-like responses to any prompt or question has raised some apprehensions among educators about the implications for teaching and learning. Some of the issues that have been highlighted are the potential for bias and confabulation (often mislabeled as hallucinations) in the outputs of LLMs and impact on long-term cognitive development of learners. While these are legitimate concerns, LLMs can also be valuable partners for educators in tackling the challenges that healthcare training programs and institutions face. In this interactive presentation, you will see live demonstrations of how LLMs can be used creatively to address these challenges. You will have the opportunity to discuss the feasibility and ethical implications of each solution with your peers in small groups. The session will conclude with a large group discussion on how healthcare educators can leverage LLMs in the near future.

Rebecca Philipsborn, M.D., MPA
Associate Professor of Pediatrics
Emory University School of Medicine

Start Where You Are:  Integrating Climate and Health into Your Curriculum

Since at least 2007, medical professional societies have called for the inclusion of training and curricula on climate change and health in medical education.  The annual questionnaire of the Liaison Committee on Medical Education (LCME) now asks whether schools cover the topic of climate change in required and elective courses.  Despite meaningful advancements, the urgency of the climate crisis looms large, substantial clinical curricular gaps remain, and evaluation strategies are lacking. While educating our learners about climate change is important to meet the needs of our patients, the climate crisis also offers a paradigm through which to nurture the skill of adaptive expertise in our learners. In this talk, Dr. Philipsborn will equip educators with strategies to integrate climate change and health in their teaching and curricula.  She will challenge the audience to weld their roles and expertise in medical education to further this field.