Clean Air Campaign: Responding to a Public Health Emergency - Air Pollution
Lottie has lots of experience developing educational resources, and is currently writing and implementing teaching on healthcare and domestic abuse for the University of Oxford. This summer, she's also leading a small Project Team developing an open source Clean Air Teaching Resource aimed at foundation doctors - read on to find out more and get involved!
“Air Pollution is a public health emergency. It has devastating impacts on health, contributing to increased rates of heart and lung disease and contributing to around 7 million premature deaths every year around the world.
Despite this, UK healthcare professionals are largely unprepared and unequipped to respond. At best, we are aware of the issue but don’t know what to do; at worst, we are woefully unaware of the issue’s scale and severity.
Over 2023-24, members of the Just Love Healthcare Sphere carried out a scoping exercise, praying and thinking about how we are best-placed to make a difference on various urgent public health issues. We identified UK air pollution as a key priority, and began researching opportunities to get involved and pool our collective impact.
After exploring various avenues, we found that dozens of excellent clean air organisations already exist, especially at a public policy and hospital board level. However, we believe there is a need for much more bottom-up, education-based resourcing focused on medical practitioners themselves - and that's what we're going to do.
Doctors, nurses and other medical practitioners are often the first port of call for people struggling with pollution-related issues. Lots of great research and tools exist that can help patients significantly mitigate their air pollution exposure with relatively simple steps, but the majority of medical professionals are unlikely to know what these are, or be confident and well-briefed on how to articulate them. We want to equip frontline staff with simple, practical steps they can take to make a significant difference in their patients' lives.
Within 10 years, we want every doctor in the UK to understand the health impacts of air pollution, feel empowered to discuss this with patients, and be able to offer practical, everyday solutions. Our approach empowers first hundreds and then thousands of doctors via practical training. We want to synthesise the best research, create a foundation doctor teaching session, and use our networks to spread it like wildfire across the NHS.
Over summer, we're building a small, dynamic team to begin making this happen, creating a high-impact Clean Air Teaching Resource to trial in 1-5 hospitals next academic year. Using the classic medical model of ‘see one, do one, teach one’, this 1 hour teaching will be delivered to foundation doctors as part of their core teaching, with audit. The finished product will include a session agenda, a simple online bank of follow-up resources, and an open source facilitators guide to make it easy for recipients to replicate and contextualise the teaching elsewhere. In contrast to some other things we've come across, this will be fully open source, cost-free and immediately replicable, such that it can easily spread like wildfire across the NHS and beyond.
The session will be exclusively practical, covering: 1) The basic health impacts of Air Pollution. 2) Specific tools to discuss this with patients; 3) Practical, research-based steps that patients can actually take to effectively reduce their Air Pollution exposure.
The beauty of this open source approach is its simplicity, scalability and replicability. Once the work is done, it’s easy for others to use and improve. Over a short timescale, we believe a small team (4–5) can create a fantastic resource and then watch it fly.
We’d love you to be part of this exciting project! We've built our core team for the summer, but could still take on 1-3 more researchers and session-writers over summer! This is a great way to build experience in public health research and/or in training design and writing.
The exact commitment is role-dependent, but is likely to be approximately 1-2hrs/wk over 3 months (Jul, Aug, Sep), including a 45 min Zoom call once a fortnight (timings tbc). Team members can carry on into next academic year if desired, or can step back in September once the resource is ready. Read more here or sign up now to get involved!”