Students experience the effects of climate change on children’s health in role play and develop strategies for medical work – an interactive seminar

Abstract

This project report describes the development and evaluation of an interactive seminar on the topic “medical effects of climate change on children's health”.Objectives: The learning objectives are learning the basics and the direct and indirect connections between climate change and children's health. Future scenarios for affected children, parents and doctors are developed interactively. Subsequently, communication strategies concerning climate change are discussed so that students identify and analyze possibilities to become active.Methodology: The seminar was offered as an obligatory seminar for a total of 128 third-year medical students with one appointment of 45 minutes per course group as part of the interdisciplinary seminar series “Environmental Medicine”. A course group consisted of 14 to 18 students. The seminar for the 2020 summer semester was developed as part of the interdisciplinary field of environmental medicine with the special feature of an interactive role play. The role play intends to give the students the opportunity to put themselves in the situation of affected children, parents and doctors of the future in order to develop detailed solution strategies. From 2020 to 2021, the seminar took place as online self-study due to the lockdown requirements. Since winter semester 2021/22, the seminar was held as an attendance event for the first time, although the switch to an online presence seminar with obligatory attendance had to take place after four seminar dates due to renewed lockdown requirements, which also took place four times. The evaluated results here refer to a total of eight dates in the winter semester 2021/22 and were carried out using a specially developed questionnaire, which was filled out voluntarily and anonymously by the students immediately after the respective seminar date. An overall grade as well as the appropriateness of the time and content of lectures and role play were asked for. Free text answers were possible for each question.Results: A total of 83 questionnaires were evaluated, 54 of which were from the four seminars in attendance, 15 were from the four online presence seminars that took place as an online live stream. The evaluation of the seminar resulted in an average grade of 1.7 for the face-to-face seminars and 1.9 for the online seminars. Content-related comments in the free-text answers addressed the desire for concrete solution strategies, more time for discussions and a more in-depth study of the topic. Numerous positive responses described the seminar as “very exciting”, “good food for thought”, “interesting and important topic”.Conclusion: There is a very high interest on the topic of “climate change & health” among students There is an obvious need to integrate the topic on a larger scale into medical education. Ideally, the focus on children's health should be an integral part of the pediatric curriculum.

Keywords

• medical education
• climate change
• global warming
• global health
• pediatrics
• perinatology