Teaching sustainability to online healthcare students: a viewpoint

Sustainability is an essential component of education today, as it is regarded as a global requirement in higher education. Since the outbreak of COVID-19, we have witnessed a rapid increase in healthcare student numbers within the online learning department of our university. While the importance of sustainability is recognised, how to educate this to online healthcare students remains to be discussed. Accordingly, this viewpoint paper identifies challenges regarding the integration of sustainability education and reports our attempts to address these challenges. The lack of time in the curriculum, minimal sustainability knowledge from healthcare educators, understanding of clinical relevance and consistency in curriculum planning were identified as the four key problems. To address this, at our university, sustainability content was introduced to the learning materials, academic staff increased their subject knowledge, an interdisciplinary student conference targeting sustainability was utilised, and future curriculum planning will see sustainability embedded. Informal feedback from students and staff has been positive, indicating a need for empirical investigation. Insights offered in this viewpoint can provide ideas for non-sustainability educators who wish to embed sustainability education in a feasible time and cost-effective way.