Putting environmental sustainability and planetary health into practice: through leadership standards for health professionals

Health professionals can play important roles in promoting planetary health, including by contributing to delivering environmentally sustainable healthcare. Interventions that promote planetary health may be more frequently and effectively implemented where leaders have knowledge, skills and values aligned with planetary health.

Aims This study aimed to:

1. Highlight synergies between health professionals’ leadership competencies and planetary health principles.
2. Elucidate how health professionals can meet their leadership competencies while simultaneously learning about and promoting planetary health.

Methods Health professionals representing multiple professions engaged in discussions exploring how health leadership impacts planetary health. Discussants selected competencies from the Faculty of Medical Leadership and Management that align with the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals and pertain to planetary health. The selected competencies were reworded to explicitly reference planetary health.

Findings Two competencies in each of seven leadership domains were reworded to explicitly reference planetary health. Practical examples of how these competencies could be achieved while promoting planetary health were developed to guide learners, educators and those developing professional standards to incorporate a planetary health perspective.

Conclusion A multiprofessional group identified how health leadership competencies and planetary health priorities can be addressed simultaneously in lifelong learning across all health professions, disciplines and levels of training.