Climate Change: could it help develop 'adaptive expertise'?

Preparing health practitioners to respond to the rising burden of disease from climate change is emerging as a priority in health workforce policy and planning. However, the issue is hardly represented in the medical education research. The rapidly evolving wide range of direct and indirect consequences of climate change will require health professionals to have not only broad content knowledge but also flexibility and responsiveness to diverse regional problems, but they do creatively seek to better solve novel problems. This may be the result of an acquired approach to practice or a pathway that can be fostered by learning environments. It is also know that building adaptive expertise in medical education involves putting students on a learning pathway that requires them to have, first, the motivation to innovatively problem-solve and, second, exposure to diverse content material, meaningfully presented. Including curriculum content on the health effects of climate change could help meet these two conditions for some students at least. A working definition and illustrative competencies for adaptive expertise for climate change, as well as examples of teaching and assessment approaches extrapolated from rural curricula, are provided.