PgDip Specialist Community Public Health Nursing and PgDip Community Nursing Specialist Practitioner

Education for Sustainable Development (ESD)

Course content related to sustainable development

A holistic understanding of sustainability is developed in these programmes and the commitment to ESD is evidenced in the programme aims. One of the programme aims for SCPHN is ‘Be a leader in the field of SCPHN, holding specialist knowledge of the essential theories, principles and concepts that will underpin your practice including biopsychosocial, cultural, economic, and environmental factors that impact health outcomes’; key sustainability issues such as poverty, climate change and the UN sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are also referenced in the CNSP programme aims. 

The first module Integrated and Inclusive Community Practice (IICP) includes a learning outcome to ‘Demonstrate a critical understanding of local, national, and global influences on health inequalities, social development, and disparities.’. It features a session focussed on sustainable healthcare and the SDGs, where students are encouraged to think about how national policies link to the SDGs and influence the health of the population. Questions such as ‘Do bees matter to my job as a nurse?’ are raised as well as important points such as the fact that the Coca-Cola’s marketing budget is bigger than the World Health Organisation budget. Students are encouraged to critically engage with the SDGs, through discussions about the challenges around ‘goals’ and the lack of legislation and voluntary nature of the SDGs. 

A session in the Evidence Based Community Practice & Research module, titled ‘Research, Quality Improvement and Ethics – Why it matters in nurse leadership’, also incorporates the SDGs. Sustainability is highlighted as an ethical/moral principle that requires consideration in nursing decisions. Current actions and potential expectable consequences are explored, which contextualise environmental/financial factors in a responsible manner. 

Competencies for sustainability

A key element of ESD is supporting learners to develop competencies that will help them to tackle and cope with sustainability challenges. Within the SCPHN and CNSP programmes the key competencies developed are: 

• Critical thinking: particularly developed in the Evidence Based Community Practice and Research assessment.
• Empathy and compassion: Students explore how climate change might impact their clients and as part of their essay for IICP they are asked to identify an underserved group in their community and look at the ways that policy and societal structures limit their access to health, while also considering opportunities to change and improve this.
• Self-awareness: students are encouraged to understand privilege on an individual level but also as citizens on a UK and a global scale.

Pedagogical approaches

ESD uses action-orientated and transformative pedagogical approaches to facilitate taking sustainability knowledge and competencies into practice. Teaching methods and pedagogical practices used in the SCPHN and CNSP programmes include:

• Co-construction of learning
• Use of case studies
• Opportunities for critical reflection 
• Enquiry-based learning 
• Use of real-world problems 

Questions to Miriam Collett

Is ESD is embedded in any assessments in the module?

The assessment for module Evidence Based Community Practice and Research consists of delivering a 10-minute presentation, followed by up to 15 minutes of questions. In the presentation, students are required to propose a change project and demonstrate the importance and rationale of it. They are required to use their capability and knowledge to critically analyse evidence and research to plan the change in a sustainable way that aligns with organisational, regional and national strategy. 

As well as other key elements of a project such as measurable objectives and outcomes, students need to demonstrate ethical and sustainability issues pertaining to the project and consider any sustainability impacts of the change.

Assessment criteria include ‘Demonstrate a critical understanding of local, national, and global influences on planning change within your specialist area’ and ‘Demonstrate the ability to critically evaluate ethical and sustainability concerns including the impact on vulnerable groups’.

Assessed intended learning outcomes include ‘Critically appraise and demonstrate clinical reasoning and evaluation knowledge within the health and social care environment, including continuing improvement, professional and service development, entrepreneurship, finance, leadership multidisciplinary working, sustainable development goals.’

Why did you include ESD in your teaching?

I visited the UN as part of a holiday in New York a few years ago and learned about the SDGs and the impact that ESD can have. When we came to redesign the SCPHN & CNSP programmes we were able to align the Nursing & Midwifery Programme Standards and the SDGs, highlighting the link between our roles as nurses and sustainable development. 

I wanted to highlight to the students the impact of the climate emergency on their patients, communities and practice as specialist nurses, ensuring they understood what role they could take in reducing the impact of the climate emergency. 

We will continue to embed sustainability as the students rave about the SDGs and we can see a real impact on their practice in terms of them thinking in a more sustainable and considered way around the impact on those with less privilege than them. They also gain a real deepening of understanding of how global goals/policy impacts on national and then local policy, and about the impact of the climate emergency on the health of their clients. 

How do you link ESD to other priorities such as decolonising the curriculum, acknowledging and learning from Indigenous Knowledge, and wider equity, diversity and inclusion?

Throughout the programmes the intersections between areas such as sustainable development, ethics, equity, justice, inclusion and decolonising are explored. 

The key purpose of the IICP module is to encourage students to recognise their own privilege, understand complexities of people's experiences and appreciate the importance of working together and in partnership with clients and organisations.

In the module students are given an SDG and asked to think about how it fits with the communities they work with. Issues of climate justice and topics such as the impact of heat waves on patient care, sun exposure for homeless clients and issues around crops, food chains and knock on effect if we are all malnourished are raised. We also discuss things like Earth Overshoot Day and the burden of responsibility on the global south vs global north.

Within the Evidence Based Community Practice & Research module ethics and how they link to sustainability are explored. Students are guided to think about responsible use of resources, preservation of the environment, as well as equitable access to healthcare services.

Feedback from students about the programmes

• “I personally have taken the most away from your module [IICP], I really feel it has shaped my practice and myself as a person, rethinking the way I think about underserved communities and feeling really motivated to try and ensure improvements within practice.”
• “Looking at people holistically and looking more at social prescribing and its impact”
• “Communities can inadvertently discriminate against those who have less power and privilege”
• “Better understanding of intersectionality and privilege”
• “The wider determinants of health of social, economic and environmental factors that impacts all people of various ways”