Planetary Health and Medical Profession: A Focus Group Discussion with Medical Stu-dents of Bushehr University of Medical Sciences

Planetary health is a concept that denotes the human health is connected with Earth’s natu-ral systems and they are not separable from each other. Planetary health indicates for the importance of Earth’s natural systems in terms of averted cases of disease and the potential harm that arises from human-caused perturbations of these systems.

In order to evaluate the perspective of medical students of Bushehr University of Medical Sciences about planetary health in relation to medical profession, the method of focus group discussion (FGD) was used. Four sessions of FGDs with participation of 21 medical student were de-signed. The level of their knowledge on climate change and its relationship with human health (the first goal), the scope of physicians’ duty in connection with planetary health, and how to introduce this duty to medical students (the second goal) were the keystones of the FDG sessions.

The medical students were thoroughly aware of climate change and its impacts on environment via the media and their personal experiments. They also had a high level of knowledge about the close relation of human-caused perturbations with human health. The majority of participants believed that the attention to bioenvironmental challenges should be among the ethical and organizational duty of the future physicians. The use of attractive and multimedia approaches in association with field work were emphasized to improve the level of medical students’ knowledge about topics of planetary health.

It is possible to integrate planetary health educations into the medical curricula by avoid-ance of traditional methods and turning to innovative and creative approaches in the format of interdisci-plinary and field works. Hence, the future physicians will attain a sufficient level of knowledge in order to combat with human-caused climate perturbations.