Parental knowledge, awareness, and intended healthcare-seeking responses toward congenital heart disease in the West Bank, Palestine: a cross-sectional study.

Climate change is the biggest global health threat of the 21st century. [] The United States (US) healthcare system accounts for 25% of the global health sector’s greenhouse gas emissions (GHGe) and 8.5–10% of the US’s total GHGe. [–] Climate change influences how care is delivered, increases medical costs, impacts mental health, and intensifies the risk of natural disasters. [–] This inevitably will disproportionately affect those of lower socioeconomic status. [, ] In the US, many medical schools have adopted an ethical oath with an emphasis on non-maleficence, modeling the Hippocratic Oath. [, ] With this declaration, physicians have an obligation to not only protect patients from harm but also to consider how to prevent harm locally and globally. Several have already advocated for the implementation of climate education into the medical curricula. In 2018, Wellbery et al. worked alongside the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) to query their curriculum inventory, which aggregates institution-reported curricular activity, but the search indicated that schools do not report any explicit inclusion of climate change education in their curriculum. [] In 2019, medical students at the University of San Francisco standardized a Planetary Health Report Card for the evaluation of medical schools to help inspire change at the institutional level. [] In 2024, Cois et al. examined curricula in graduate medical education (GME) programs. [] Finally, Hampshire et al. conducted a survey of 722 medical students from 24 medical schools. Of the 600 respondents, approximately 84% of students believed that climate change and health effects should be included, yet only 13% believed that their school provided adequate education. []. Given the recent rollback of US federal regulations and agencies supporting climate initiatives, including the US withdrawal from the Paris Climate agreement and the United Nations Framework on Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), it is imperative to incorporate the realities of climate change and its impact in medicine. [, ] In order to better equip future physicians, climate education and environmental sustainability must be incorporated into the medical school curricula. Therefore, in this scoping review, we aimed to survey the existing literature on how climate change content is being currently integrated into medical school curricula within the US and highlight the feasibility of educational interventions based on institutional needs.