LEADING THE SCHOOL ON CLIMATE & HEALTH The Pulse Leading the school on climate health Head of school Professor Colin Doherty wants everyone in the school to work on climate and health and to empower our students to be the future leaders At the School meeting in December 2023, as Head of School you made a clarion call for the School to pivot to action on climate, for all us individually and collectively to help halt the speed and progression of global warming, why did you make this appeal? When I took up the post of Head of School 18 months ago, I was only dimly aware of the hundreds of minutiae which would keep my days and diary full, but all the time I’ve kept my eyes on the larger aspirations I have had for Trinity’s School of Medicine. Among them is pivoting to address some of the grand and wicked challenges facing us in society as a whole such as human-made climate change. We must be ready to address global warming with reference to its effects on health and well- being and on the delivery of healthcare itself. Our duty is clear; we must not only provide our students with curricular education in this area and develop expertise such that we provide advice on policy to national and international government agencies and NGOs but we must also encourage our world class researchers to pivot their focus to address the myriad challenges the field throws up. I’m under no illusions about how hard this pivot will be. Given the current funding environment, researchers with strengths in certain areas will be both brave and foolhardy to leave the comfort of their experience and branch out into new areas, but it’s hard to ignore the urgency of this, which is why I wanted to put this front and centre at my first full school meeting. You also spoke about how the School needs a stronger focus on students and how the students are much more concerned about climate than staff are, what can the School do to ensure staff are more mobilised on climate and what can the staff do to support student action in this area? I’m really glad you brought up students in the same breath as climate. In my annual report that I sent the whole school September last year I made the point that I perceived there to be a significant disconnect between the aspirations and needs of the School’s students and its faculty. Some of this comes from the Inevitable growth of student numbers; we now have 1,500 postgraduate students which is a 50% increase in the last 15 years. Growth has been particularly strong in undergraduate medicine which has nearly doubled in size from 100 to 200 entrants per year over the same period. It’s 4 Summer Edition 2024
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