Mapping existing Masters and professional education courses on planetary health and sustainable healthcare.
Meet Rachel Foulkes, the Future Leaders Project Assistant working on Planetary Health Education. Rachel graduated last summer with an MMath in Pure Mathematics from Newcastle University. She recently completed a PGCE specialising in mathematics at Cambridge University.
The Public Health Education Group (PHEG) is responsible for teaching public health to medical students and teaching planetary health to students on the MPhil in Population Health Sciences at the University of Cambridge.
Planetary health is a field of research and education focused on the interplay between human health and the determinants of health in our living and physical world. It is not just about describing the challenges we face, but also about finding solutions to address these.
The aim of this project is to identify opportunities for further taught education at the graduate level on the subject of planetary health and sustainable healthcare within the University of Cambridge.
Rachel will undertake a mapping of existing Masters and professional education courses within the University of Cambridge which either contain teaching on environmental change/impact or human health, or have the potential to include these, to identify where these two perspectives might be brought together.
The primary output will be a report on the opportunities for integration of planetary health within existing Masters and professional courses within the University. This report will be used to inform work in the University by PHEG, PHPC, the School of Clinical Medicine, and Cambridge Zero to strengthen provision of education in this field.
In addition, the project will support the generation of ideas for new courses and, if time allows, initial scoping work related to these will be undertaken.