Included in this edition:
- Civic Health Month! How You Can Make a Difference
- Texas PSR Speaks out Against LNG Exports
- Environmental Health in the Classroom: Texas and Beyond
- Fall Course for Primary Care Providers: Occupational and Environmental Medicine
- How Green is Your Travel?
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Civic Health Update: How You Can Make a Difference
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August is Civic Health Month and Texas PSR is working with National PSR and other partners to encourage members to get active in this year's election.
There are many ways for health professionals to get involved! Below we are highlighting three great ways to take part in get out the vote efforts in the next three months.
Vot-ER: Sign up to receive a free badge with a QR code that can be used to register patients and colleagues in the workplace
- Please refer to workplace rules set forth by your employer to find out if you need approval to wear this badge
- Badges will be mailed to you in up to three weeks. In the meantime, share this link with prospective voters.
Environmental Voter Project: Get involved by contacting voters who view the environment as their number one priority but don't have a strong history of turning out to vote.
- You can make calls from your own home, send postcards, and if you are located in Austin, knock doors.
Vote Forward: Write letters to voters
- As a part of Vote Forward’s Social Campaigns, you can write nonpartisan letters to help increase voter turnout in key states from historically underrepresented communities
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Texas PSR Speaks out Against LNG Exports
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Board Member Alan Nagarajan participated in last month's press conference on health harms of liquified natural gas (LNG) exports. This press conference came in conjunction with a letter to the Department of Energy (DOE) and White House. The letter calls on them to consider the health and equity impacts of LNG's entire polluting lifecycle in their public interest determination.
As health professionals seeing patients deal with impacts of fossil fuel pollution and climate change, Texas PSR and partners asked for a simple change when it comes to LNG exports: the DOE to account for the full public health, health equity, and climate change impacts of this massive LNG infrastructure buildout.
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Environmental Health in the Classroom
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Not too long after UT Austin’s Dell Medical School opened its doors for its first class of medical students, Texas PSR board members got to work imagining how to add environmental health education to the school’s offerings.
After years of collaboration and with a grant from the Cynthia and George Mitchell Foundation, board members of Texas PSR worked with faculty and administrators to add “Environmental Threats to Human Health” as a Spring elective, first offered in 2021. Unlike many medical schools on the cutting edge of climate health education, Texas PSR incorporated both climate health topics and environmental pollution driven by the fossil fuel industry, with lectures on air and water pollution and the impacts of plastics on our lives. Other medical schools around the world are joining, and expanding their climate change curriculums.
From the beginning, UT Austin’s class was also unique because it incorporated an advocacy component, requiring students to complete a class project on either environmental health education (K-12, for practitioners or for patients) or public advocacy with a health voice. By 2023, Texas had four environmental or climate and health electives around the state and UT Southwestern has incorporated climate and health into their second year organ system curriculum.
PSR Board President Adelita Cantu will continue to expand this type of education in Texas as the awardee of the Esta Caliente: Empowering Today's Youth to Meet Tomorrow's Climate Challenges grant. Professor Cantu will be organizing and conducting classes on climate change and health literacy to Hispanic youth in a vulnerable community.
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Fall Course for Primary Care Providers: Occupational and Environmental Medicine
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Join Texas PSR Board Member Dr. William "Brett" Perkison who will be a speaker for this engaging, online, self-paced fall course. This online course is designed for primary care physicians, physician assistants, nurse practitioners, family medicine residents, and other primary care providers who have limited formal preparation in occupational and environmental medicine (OEM), but handle occupational health problems on a full or part-time basis.
The course will review the primary care provider's role in administrative and legal issues related to occupational and environmental health. PCPs may frequently encounter work-related health problems in the patient population. In addition, primary care providers may be called upon by small companies and businesses to serve as medical advisors. However, most PCPs have little or no formal background and/or training in occupational medicine.
The OEM for PCPs course is also intended for medical resident trainees considering a specialty in family medicine or primary care medicine, and is designed to assist family medicine residency programs in fulfilling occupational medicine training requirements.
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How Green is Your Travel?
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Most of us love to travel. But travel’s “dark side“ is its environmental cost: the carbon dioxide and other pollutants created from the fossil fuels burned for travel by air, land, or sea. The Green Travel Guide from the PSR’s My Green Doctor offers ways to calculate and reduce your travel carbon footprint.
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My Green Doctor is a free money-saving membership benefit available to the Texas PSR Chapter provided through Physicians for Social Responsibility National. Members use the “Meeting-by-Meeting Guide” to learn how to adopt environmental sustainability, save resources, address the health threats of climate change, and help create healthier communities. This requires adding just five minutes to each regular clinic or practice staff meeting, making small changes at each meeting that really add up. Watch the “Three Minute Video” that explains how easy it is to incorporate My Green Doctor into your practice. We welcome everyone in your practice to register as Partner Society members at https://www.MyGreenDoctor.org or at www.MyGreenDoctor.es (si, en espanol). Use the discount code MGDPSR when you register to get free access to My Green Doctor and save money!
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Are you interested in learning more, or getting involved in local actions to prevent the growing threat that nuclear weapons pose to our health and environment? Let us know of your interest and we'll be in touch! Fill out this quick form or email our Executive Director at Director@TexasPSR.org.
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We do so much with so little, imagine what we could do
with just a little bit more!
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To mail your contribution to us, please send a check to our new mailing address: Texas PSR, 3571 Far West Blvd. #3428 Austin, TX 78731
As a registered non-profit under section 501(c)(3) of the IRS code, all donations are tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law.
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