Description
Introduction and Objectives:
Uttarakhand is a northern state of India, with 85% of its area in the hills of the Himalayas, exceptionally prone to climate change. For the last few decades, large-scale migration, uncontrolled tourism, developmental activities, rapid urbanization, increased pollution, frequent natural disasters, and difficult geography have created public health problems and healthcare challenges for communities, governments, and healthcare providers. We started a project, ‘Nature Prescription,’ on June 1, 2023, in Dehradun, the capital city of Uttarakhand, utilizing the social credibility of physicians with objectives for creating awareness about climate change, environment, and health among people, communities, and public health systems.
Methodology:
Nature prescription is conceptually referred to as advising patients to spend time with nature. Here in Uttarakhand, we mold it based on the local situations and needs. We decided to prescribe small actions to help decrease pollution, heal nature, and promote environment-friendly food or lifestyle changes with health promotion and climate sensitization values. Those small steps or actions depend on the patient’s age, social conditions, lifestyle, occupation, and health problem. For example, a patient with COPD may get advice that if they notice burning of waste in surroundings (a common practice in rural India), they may go to people and tell them about their breathing problem and how their actions worsen their condition. For physicians, we created an online platform where we provided information and available scientific studies and made senior and renowned doctors brand ambassadors as ‘Champions of Nature Prescription.’ Currently, they are 10.
Results and Discussions:
It is a long-duration initiative, and we are still in the initial phase. The initial results are encouraging because physicians willingly join us as they can advocate for a global cause from their office without investing much of their time or resources. Practically all clinicians can do it. It will also help create much-needed awareness regarding the health consequences of climate change among doctors, healthcare professionals, and public health systems. In the initial 2 – 3 months, we noticed that patients are also willing to follow the advice of their physicians, and the message is going to the families. Physicians participating in this initiative for the last three months told us that ‘Nature Prescription’ adds value to their prescriptions. It is creating a critical awareness tool in the communities. With a successful first phase, we plan to extend this initiative to the medical and healthcare associations, hospitals, and institutions by the end of November or December 2023 to make it statewide. For that, we have a predefined plan.
Conclusions:
This initiative involves physicians and patients, the most crucial stakeholders in any healthcare system, and does not require any extra financing and resources. Physicians need not leave their clinic for this advocacy work. It works with existing public health systems, clinics, and hospitals. Only they are adding their ‘Nature Prescription’ to their prescriptions. It makes this initiative a self-sustaining tool for spreading awareness of climate change and health. Our final aim is to make every prescription a ‘Nature Prescription.’
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