Coming Soon in 2024: IHI Open School Single-Course Purchases

Climate change is the greatest global threat to human health and health care is contributing to this crisis. Although health care provides necessary clinical care delivery for individuals affected by climate change, the sector also contributes to the problem causing as much as 4.6% of the total greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. In this course, you will gain a foundational education on the relationship between climate change, health care, and human health, which will enable you to further engage with decarbonizing clinical care delivery, while ensuring that safe and quality patient care is provided.

The health sector is a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions and presents clinicians with a unique opportunity to lead by example and decarbonize clinical practice. This module focuses on three key areas of care delivery that have a high environmental impact: anesthetic gases, inhalers, and medical supplies & devices. These areas account for a significant share of the health sector’s emissions, and offer potential for cost savings, improved patient outcomes, and reduced waste. The module presents evidence-based interventions that can be integrated into clinical practice to minimize greenhouse gas emissions stemming from care delivery.

While healthcare systems and governments around the world have acknowledged the climate crisis as a health crisis, knowledge of how to implement QI initiatives with a focus on environmental conservation, stewardship, and healthcare decarbonization is in its nascency. In this course, participants will learn how to integrate QI principles into environmental sustainability initiatives centered around the triple aim of improving population health, experience of care, and per capita cost and the triple bottom line framework of improving outcomes for people, the planet, and profits. Examples of replicable environmental sustainability initiatives will be reviewed, so that stakeholders in healthcare can further lead in decarbonization efforts. 

Contextualizing care is the process of adapting care to the personal circumstances and characteristics of individual patients. The failure to do so, when it results in suboptimal plan of care, is a contextual error. Contextual errors, which are common and often overlooked, adversely affect health care outcomes, and they contribute to overuse and misuse of medical services. This course is designed to provide clinicians and clinicians-in-training with essential knowledge, skills, and insight to acquire competency at contextualizing care during the medical encounter. 

Acquiring competency at contextualizing care requires learner-centered instruction at each phase of pre-clinical and clinical training. This course prepares both basic science faculty and clinician educators to facilitate skills development at contextualizing care, utilizing evidence-based methods that embed learning opportunities into existing medical school (and other health professions educational program) curricula, such as clinical teaching cases and clerkship experiences. “Contextualizing Care for the Clinician 101” is a prerequisite. 

This course is designed to prepare clinical champions with the skills and a toolkit for setting up a quality improvement program to prevent contextual errors through an innovative evidence-based systems intervention. “Contextualizing Care for the Clinician 101” is a prerequisite.