E-collaborating for environmentally sustainable health curricula

Purpose: This chapter aims to demonstrate how medical educators can use e-collaborative tools to collaborating internationally and cross-institutionally towards designing environmental sustainability and health (ESH) education. The main focus of the chapter is on sustainable medical curricula. Methodology: The chapter uses a case-study approach to bridge these broader e-collaborative principles with the specifics of implementation driven and supported by e-collaboration. Findings: The case study describes the evolution of the Sustainable Healthcare Education (SHE)-network into a network collaborative. Finally, the chapter discusses e-collaboration for education development through an illustrative case. The case concerns an UK-Greek University e-collaboration aimed at combating obesity and promoting climate literacy. Research implications: E-collaboration is central at all levels of the ESH curriculum design process from forming a network collaborative around the curriculum process, alignment of assessment and learning activities with objectives, discussing and agreeing on a vision to the actual implementation plan. Practical implications: E-collaboration aids the curriculum design process such that people feel that their participation and interests are valued, as well as providing resources and input to resource stressed academics and institutions. E-collaboration is not an end in itself, but a means of enabling a global network collaborative to address an issue that suits this type of collaboration towards sustainable healthcare education. Originality: This chapter is inventive in showing how the promotion of climate literacy can be a component of a sustainable medical curriculum and how this process is facilitated with e-collaborative tools. The chapter demonstrates how health education should educate climate literate health professionals who are able to address and reduce public health impacts of climate change.