Yale Doctor of Nursing Student, Christie Torres, has created an invaluable new toolkit for healthcare providers regarding renal health and climate change.
The toolkit, “Climate Change and Renal Health: Awareness and Education Toolkit for Healthcare Providers” addresses the need to focus on kidney health in an era of escalating temperatures. It includes an excellent summary of Chronic Kidney Disease of non-traditional causes (CKDnt) and an elaboration of its relationship to high temperatures driven by climate change.
As Torres notes, “Globally, temperatures are not getting any cooler and kidney disease numbers are not getting smaller. Therefore, we must plan appropriately to manage this growing threat by raising HCP awareness about climate change and renal health, so that our communities, organizations, and patients can take action toward prevention and early detection.”
This toolkit gives healthcare providers the resources to understand and treat renal health issues caused by excessive heat from climate change and helps raise the general awareness of the healthcare community to the severity of consequences to the renal system that climate change poses. It also draws attention to the importance of multidisciplinarity in healthcare and understanding the sociomedical drivers of illness. As LIN, we have seen how the kidney health of vulnerable workers – whether agricultural workers struggling to make a living wage, or migrant construction workers trapped in exploitative working conditions – is considerably affected by socioeconomic precarity, gender and race-based marginalization, low employee autonomy, and unchecked labor exploitation.
As Torres summarizes, “Environmental health is now in the domain of the health care professionals’ role and practice in supporting patient care. We have immense potential in educating our patients about the human health impacts of climate change and the relationship between the exposures of climate change and where people live, work, labor and play.”
