Planetary Health Report Card

As part of the University’s work on addressing Global Challenges, our academic Schools are consistently contributing to this mission, ensuring we are positively intervening in the world around this. This work is at heart of our strategy, Practical Wisdom: Brighton 2025.

The University’s School of Sport and Health Sciences was one of only four universities internationally to help develop and pilot the Planetary Health Report Card (PHRC) for Nursing as an adaption from the PHRC tool already used by medical students.

Leonie Harrison is a Nursing (Child) BSc(Hons) student who represented the University of Brighton on this student-led initiative and she completed the project, with the support of staff from the School’s Sustainability Special Interest Group.

The PHRC Nursing enables students to evaluate how well their own nursing course addresses planetary health metrics across five categories: curriculum, research, community outreach, student-led initiatives, and campus sustainability. Leonie was delighted to announce that the University of Brighton Nursing report scored an impressive A grade!

Participating in the PHRC Nursing pilot identified the University’s strengths for sustainability, as well as areas for improvement. Importantly, this process catalysed conversations around nursing education and planetary health and how the university can equip students with the knowledge and skills to drive healthcare practice towards a more sustainable future.

Sustainable nursing practice will then help the NHS to achieve its net zero target by 2040. The report card includes examples of the fantastic efforts already made around sustainability and participating has inspired even further inclusion of planetary health into the nursing course curriculum.

The PHRC Nursing template will undergo a few modifications now that the document has been used for the first time.  The nursing students from England, Germany and the United States who developed and piloted the nursing version presented at the recent SHARE conference and will soon be publishing a journal article on our process and achievement of producing this PHRC for Nursing.

The larger PHRC group is also adapting the tool for all healthcare disciplines and the Sustainability Special Interest Group plan to support students from other courses in the School to collaborate together on the 2022-2023 report card.