Planetary Health updates

Postgraduate

| 7 May 2026

The Annual PGME May Commute-to-Work Challenge is underway! It's not too late to join - go here (https://forms.gle/ZiKbWzisTcsgAyw66) to register. This challenge is open to anyone in PGME - track your commutes for the month to gain points (more environmentally sustainable/active commutes = more points) and earn prizes and bragging rights.

Did you know? Estimates range 5-25% of Canada's total healthcare emissions come just from staff and patient travel. Canada's healthcare emissions are about 4.6% of Canada's annual emissions, so with a bit of math that means that the healthcare sector generates somewhere between 1.6 and 8 MILLION tonnes of CO2 equivalents just from travel to, from, and between care centres.

In addition to choosing more low- or no-emission travel, we can reduce that carbon footprint by choosing to provide virtual care when appropriate. Starting next week, there is a box on your commuting form called 'virtual care'. If you are able to avoid someone else needing to commute by appropriately changing an appointment to virtual care (or facilitating that change, in the case of some of our role descriptions!), please log yourself the corresponding number of 'virtual care' commutes for additional points!

Please see the HFHT Green Initiative info booklet on Virtual Care for more info: https://hamiltonfht.ca/wp-content/uploads/Virtual-Care.pdf

Environmental Algorithm

What about virtual meetings with larger groups of people? Preference for virtual, in-person or hybrid can depend on many factors, including environmental. Consider using this algorithm, proposed in A. El Zouhbi et al. / Journal of Clinical Epidemiology 188 (2025) 111974, specifically looking at the optimal format for guideline development panels.

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