Connecting climate health, patient care and medical education
Through classroom discussion and sustainability advocacy in his own community, Dr. Brian Drummond encourages students to consider how climate change affects patient health.
Brian Drummond, MD, enjoying a walk through a dry creek bed in Northern Arizona.
Long before Brian Drummond, MD, clinical professor of emergency medicine, began teaching climate health to medical students, his move to the Sonoran Desert in 2012 reshaped how he thought about sustainability, resource use and human health. Today, he brings that perspective to both patient care and medical education.
“Climate solutions are health solutions, directly impacting my patients and my community,” Dr. Drummond said.
In the emergency department, he sees firsthand how rising temperatures, poor air quality and extreme weather are already affecting patients across Arizona. And in the classroom, he invites students to explore their own connections with climate and healthcare.
Teaching climate health to future physicians
At the College of Medicine – Tucson, Dr. Drummond teaches the “Climate, Health and the Environment” elective centered on discussion and reflection about how environmental changes are reshaping patient care. The course explores how climate change affects patient health through extreme heat, worsening air quality and environmental hazards that are increasingly common in Arizona.
Teaching climate and planetary health in the 896A Global Health Intensive course.
Over the past three years, interest in the course has steadily grown. Dr. Drummond said he values “amazing discussion with medical students” and enjoys watching students grow from being “a little climate curious to being in the top 1% of physicians in terms of their climate health knowledge.”
“Each student has great reflections from their lives and envisions how their future practice may be affected by climate health topics and how they can practice more sustainable healthcare,” he said.
He hopes students leave the elective better prepared to recognize how climate-related challenges shape the communities they will eventually serve.
Connecting climate health to human health
Dr. Drummond said the COVID-19 pandemic inspired him to start paying closer attention to the relationship between environmental conditions and patient health. Seeing patients with sidewalk burns caused by extreme heat, more children struggling to breathe because of poor air quality, and the large amount of hospital waste generated made him consider how climate issues affect health.
The Drummond family captures rainwater in cisterns for outdoor irrigation for shade trees.
“We saw during COVID by just decreasing fossil fuel use in the transportation sector, our skies and water cleared in a matter of weeks,” Dr. Drummond said. “Knowing that our behaviors matter, we can educate and advocate for actions and policies that improve everyone’s health in Arizona.”
Around that time, one of Dr. Drummond’s residents told him about a climate and health science policy fellowship at the University of Colorado.
“I was intrigued that this was a thing in medicine,” he said.
The resident encouraged him to connect with the Medical Society Consortium on Climate and Health. The organization is made up of doctors, nurses and other healthcare professionals advocating for policies that protect public health and the environment, while also serving as a resource for information and education. Within a week, Dr. Drummond connected with a colleague in Phoenix who shared similar interests. Together they co-founded Arizona Health Professionals for Climate Action, the Arizona chapter of the consortium.
“Since then, I knew the rest of my career would be dedicated to this field, as climate solutions are health solutions — directly impacting my patients and my community,” he said.
Dr. Drummond says it’s crucial to understand how climate change affects human health.
“We all are experiencing extreme heat not only in our summers, but our winters and springs are warming as well,” he said. “This same climate change process is leading to worsening air quality in the form of allergens, smog and particulate matter.”
During Arizona heat waves, he increasingly sees how vulnerable patients are affected first.
“Extreme heat and air pollution lead to an increase in heart attacks, diabetes, pregnancy complications, neurologic conditions, strokes and lung disease,” he said. “Understanding the impact of these health hazards on our community’s patients, we can better deploy climate-positive solutions that will have immediate health impacts.”
Sustainability at home and in the community
That perspective carries into his home. He reflects on his arrival in Southern Arizona nearly 15 years ago.
Dr. Drummond spends off time making improvements in and around the family’s home, such as building green infrastructure in the form of a streetside stormwater basin.
“Given the scarcity of resources, I felt the need to live as sustainably as possible because the desert does not naturally support a large human population,” he said. “To live this way, we did a green remodel on our home adding solar panels to generate clean power, rainwater harvesting cisterns to capture our most precious resource and a gray water system to reuse shower water, and installed sustainable building materials including an induction stovetop, cork floors, clay plaster wall coverings and wool carpets.”
The project reflected the family’s effort to adapt to desert living and reduce their environmental impact through everyday choices at home.
“I became active in our community, teaching and sharing my experiences with these practices through Boy Scouts, schools and community organizations,” he said.
Finding a specialty with variety and impact
Dr. Drummond said his interest in medicine began during his childhood in San Diego.
“I broke my leg playing soccer in 8th grade and was fascinated that I could be fixed,” he said. “From that point on I wanted to be an orthopedic surgeon.”
At Northwestern University, he earned a bachelor’s degree in biology-physiology, followed by a medical degree.
Creating a rainwater harvesting basin and “getting back to playing in the sandbox” helps to de-stress and improves mental health, Dr. Drummond said.
“I always planned on doing orthopedics, but once in medical school, I felt it was very repetitive in nature,” Dr. Drummond said. “I switched to plastic surgery to have the ability to be more creative with reconstruction surgeries.”
A fourth-year rotation in the emergency department ultimately changed his direction again.
“There was a lot of waiting around for operating room cases,” he said. “I just wanted to work when I was at work and then have the rest as free time. EM fit that bill — plus I still get to do a little orthopedics and complex lacerations. I also liked seeing a wide variety of patients. I switched and have not looked back.”
For Dr. Drummond, emergency medicine offers a front-row view of how environmental conditions affect patients in real time, while teaching gives him an opportunity to prepare future physicians for those challenges. Through both roles, he hopes to help build a healthcare system that is more responsive to the realities of climate and human health.