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Climate emergency: Taking action on planetary health | |
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The annual Climate Emergency conference, hosted by the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment (CAPE) will be back this upcoming Saturday, October 29th! This year the topics will be focused on taking action on planetary health.
Register and watch the Coalition's showcase presentation, where we will be discussing our PPE project and debuting our video The way forward is reusable: Demonstrating opportunities for safe, secure and sustainable PPE.
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Exhibit, promote, and connect with delegates and health leaders from around the world | |
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Join the International Conference on Academic Medicine (ICAM) and receive the benefit of interacting with over 2,000 of the brightest, most innovative physicians, learners, health researchers, health organisations and leaders spanning the globe.
Become an exhibitor and establish your organisation amongst the leaders of medical education and health research.
Benefits of exhibiting:
- Strengthen your message with audience engagement,
- Make key connections with your booth,
- Elevate your organisation with brand visibility.
Early bird deadline: January 31st, 2023
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Release of RETScreen® Version 9.0
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Version 9 of the RETScreen® Clean Energy Management Software platform was released on October 13th, 2022 and is now available for download from the RETScreen website. This update has arrived with a number of salient new features to enhance the RETScreen experience!
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Tackling climate and health disparities: Health care's obligation and opportunity
Health Care Without Harm
While climate change affects everyone’s ability to thrive, underserved populations are more vulnerable to its impacts and have fewer available resources to adapt to the changing climate.
These disparities are distinctly revealed by the increasing frequency of climate-fueled heat waves and hurricanes.
Tragically, this inequitable exposure to climate risks leads to disproportionate health impacts.
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How should we respond to health care generating environmental harm?
AMA Journal of Ethics
Despite the age-old, ethical code of medicine to “do no harm,” the health sector, through its direct and indirect emissions and waste management practices, contributes to many conditions that clinicians aim to treat.
Authors discuss how health sector actions exacerbate climate warming and iatrogenically harm global public health and argue that clinicians and health organizations have ethical responsibilities to respond to the health sector’s contribution to the climate crisis.
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Demand that Elsevier Cut Ties with the Fossil Fuel Industry
Elsevier is one of the biggest names in academic publishing, operating more than 2,700 scientific, technical, and medical journals in which scientific research is peer-reviewed and published. While Elsevier and its parent company tout the important research they publish and publicly claim to be committed to a clean energy future, their practices tell a very different story.
Earlier this year, The Guardian ran an article exposing the ties of Elsevier to the fossil fuel industry and other business activities that are antithetical to meeting the kind of climate goals science tells us we need in order to reduce the worst impacts of climate change.
We think Elsevier can do better. As a member of the scientific community, your voice carries weight.
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Canada must do more to end plastic waste by 2030
Environmental Defence
Canada has committed to ending plastic waste by 2030—an ambitious goal that will require actions to address the full life-cycle of plastic. Federal regulations to ban six harmful single-use plastics will start coming into effect by the end of 2022.
The bans are a good start but they’re not enough to tackle the plastic waste problem across Canada.
Canada needs a comprehensive plan to get to the promised zero plastic waste by 2030. That means we’ll need to phase out plastics that aren’t being reused and recycled.
Tell the federal government and your MP to step up their commitment to achieving zero plastic waste and pollution by 2030.
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Illinois hospital serves 'best bowl of oats' while nourishing patients, soil and local economy
Health Care Without Harm
Situated in central Illinois, Peoria is located in the Upper Midwest food shed, where large-scale corn and soy production for animal feed and food processing are common. A small but growing contingency of farmers and food processors, however, is coalescing around practices that protect the region’s soil and grow its economy.
These food system visionaries are betting their customers will appreciate their forward thinking, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic revealed the vulnerabilities in our food system and resulted in food shortages across the country.
That’s where OSF HealthCare and oatmeal come in. With a staff of 6,000 and beds for over 600 patients, SFMC recognizes it has a powerful opportunity to promote the health and resilience of its community through its purchasing and influence.
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Health sector solutions for promoting sustainability
Food Security, Climate Change, and Health
Food is a critical foundation of human survival and a product of the Earth’s natural ecosystems and the human designed economic system. It is also a vital resource that is susceptible to social and environmental change, as shown by supply chain disruptions and price increases driven not only by the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine but by protracted crises in regions such as Africa, where massive food insecurities have been largely ignored for decades.
In the backdrop is an evolving climate emergency that is already beginning to negatively affect food production, availability, affordability, and diversity across the globe.
At the same time as food is shaped by large scale social and environmental change, the way it is produced also contributes to the interlocking crises that affect it.
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MUHC caters to Indigenous patients by adding bannock to meal trays
Montreal Gazette
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An experience with a patient who wouldn’t eat because the meals reminded him of residential school has prompted a Montreal hospital to start offering bannock bread to its Indigenous patients.
Dr. Marie-Josee Brouillette, a psychiatrist at the hospital, said patient George Matches informed hospital staff last fall that he was refusing to eat because the food at the hospital brought back memories of residential school.
“We felt awful. I didn’t know that food could be such a loaded issue,” said Brouillette. “And that, in fact, just by trying to feed a patient, it creates an experience that reminds them of a trauma.”
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Battery electric vehicle registrations continued to climb in second quarter of 2022: StatsCan
Electric Autonomy
National registrations of new zero-emission vehicles (ZEVs) — battery electrics and plug-in hybrids combined — continue to grow in Canada with StatsCan reporting a total 6.9 per cent market share for the category in Q2 2022.
For battery electric vehicles specifically, registrations for the quarter were 5.0 per cent, 0.8 per cent less than the share of new BEV registrations in Q1 2022. This decline matched ZEVs’ overall market share drop in Q2 from their 7.7 per cent perch in Q1.
In terms of actual units, StatsCan data shows that 21,764 BEVs were registered across Canada in Q2 compared to 19,695 in Q1, an increase of 10.5 per cent. For plug-in hybrids (PHEVs), the Q2 total was 8,068, up from 6,323 in Q1.
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SWTCH, Kite Mobility launch V2G pilot hosted at new Tridel-owned Toronto condo
Electric Autonomy
SWTCH Energy, an end-to-end electric vehicle charging and energy management solution provider, has launched a two-year vehicle-to-grid (V2G) pilot project at a new multi-unit residential building in Toronto.
SWTCH is using a Nissan Leaf provided by Kite Mobility to test, monitor and evaluate the business case for SWTCH’s V2G and blockchain technology. Bianca Condos in midtown Toronto is hosting the SWTCH charging infrastructure in the building’s parking lot where the Leaf will be based.
SWTCH’s partners in the pilot have their own deep roots in the clean mobility space. Kite is focused on developing a sustainable transportation model that connects MURB residents to a fleet of electric cars and bikes available for rent on the property .
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High touch surfaces in long-term care facilities often contaminated
Healthcare Facilities
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Findings from a study published recently in the American Journal of Infection Control (AJIC) provide new insights that could help long-term care (LTC) facilities assess the cleanliness of high-touch surfaces, and thereby enhance infection prevention and control measures designed to prevent serious diarrheal diseases and deaths among their residents. The study evaluated the utility of specific hygienic monitoring tools for assessing levels of microbial contamination on high-touch surfaces in 11 LTC facilities in South Carolina.
“Increasingly, hospitals are performing routine audits of high-touch surface cleanliness, helping to reduce morbidity and mortality among residents. Our results suggest similar auditing programs would benefit LTC facilities when included as part of their infection prevention programs,” says Jennifer Cannon, the paper’s lead author.
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EVENTS, TRAINING AND WEBINARS | |
Greening Health Care 2022 Forum - Practical Pathways to Decarbonization for Hospitals | |
Register now for the annual Greening Health Care Forum (in-person) on December 1. Speakers will be providing the latest intelligence on practical next steps with facility operations and capital planning for reducing energy, utility costs and emissions in existing hospitals, and essential requirements for setting and meeting evidence-based energy and emissions targets in new facilities.
Date: December 1st, 2022
Time: 8:00 AM - 6:00 PM ET
Venue: The Westin Harbour Castle Hotel, Toronto
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International Congress on Academic Medicine | |
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Registration is now open for the International Congress on academic (ICAM).
ICAM is the first international gathering dedicated to academic medicine. It will be the place for the academic medicine community to meet, network, and develop new relationships and collaborations with colleagues from around the world.
ICAM will showcase innovation and scholarship in medical education and health research. Medical students, residents and graduate students will have the opportunity to present their work, network and connect with medical education and research mentors as well as prospective employers.
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Webinar | 2022 Lancet policy brief for Canada
The 2022 report of the Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change is a comprehensive analysis of key indicators of the impact of climate change on human health and the efforts to minimize it.
The Policy Brief for Canada provides specific recommendations by leading domestic experts to highlight areas in which leaders and policy-makers should focus to develop a healthy response to climate change.
The lead authors will present this year's Policy Brief for Canada and discuss opportunities for turning the Brief's recommendations into action.
Date: October 31st, 2022
Time: 1:00pm- 2:00pm ET
REGISTER HERE
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Symposium on reuse
Practices that avoid waste and extend the life of products and materials in the economy are recognized as beneficial strategies that can reduce GHGs, conserve resources and deliver a range of social benefits.
Reuse is implemented in many sectors and innovations are competing to elevate reuse and extend the life of products in our economy.
Join hosts for an exciting day to explore the current reuse landscape in Canada and elsewhere and discuss how we can collaborate across sectors and improve policies to support the reuse economy. Come to hear from leading international initiatives, learn from businesses that are scaling-up their practices and examine how reuse benefits our communities!
Date: November 30th 2022
REGISTER HERE
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How to speed up zero-emission vehicle adoption in your municipality
The Alliance for Healthier Communities is hosting climate and finance experts from Shift: Action for Pension Wealth and Planet Health to present a webinar on the financial risks the climate crisis poses to pension funds, with a focus on the Healthcare of Ontario Pension Plan (HOOPP).
Join the webinar to learn about how HOOPP is approaching the climate crisis (including its investment in fossil fuels), what health workers are already doing to engage with HOOPP on the climate crisis, and how you can get involved.
Date: November 8th, 2022
Time: 12:00pm- 1:00pm ET
REGISTER HERE
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RETScreen® is a Clean Energy Management Software system for energy efficiency, renewable energy and cogeneration project feasibility analysis as well as ongoing energy performance analysis.
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Have you registered as an organ donor?
Contact your local organ donation agency and speak to your family about your wishes. You have the power to save and transform lives.
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The Canadian Coalition for Green Health Care is Canada’s premier green health care resource network, leading the evolution of green in Canada’s health sector as a national voice and catalyst for environmental change. www.greenhealthcare.ca | |
Some articles referred to in the Digest make reference to services and/or product offerings from specific suppliers. The CCGHC recommends that readers research the service and product offerings available through a wider range of suppliers for comparison purposes and in keeping with public sector purchasing guidelines. These articles should not be interpreted as an endorsement of any product or service. | | | | | |
