Leadership:
Health Care, Health Workers and Planetary Health in a Turbulent World
By Diane de Camps Meschino & Linda Varangu | April, 2025
"The Sun Sets on Planet Earth" by Diane de Camps
140 years ago, Eunice Newton Foote, an American scientist and women’s rights activist, conducted a simple experiment showing for the first time that carbon dioxide traps heat—demonstrating the greenhouse effect long before the term existed.
Fast forward to present-day Canada (with similar stories in other parts of the globe):
- Health facilities are so overheated that fire departments are called in to cool them down.
- Health workers operate in increasingly uninhabitable conditions, are morally distressed and exhausted.
- Hospital-acquired infections, worsened by heat, claim 8,000 lives a year.
- Emergency Medical Systems are paralyzed by hospital overcrowding in an extreme heat event.
- Extreme heat event kills over 600 people, mostly marginalized, elderly, and isolated.
- Entire towns are incinerated by wildfire within minutes, amplified by extreme heat.
- Air quality declines due to heat-driven ground-level ozone – with severe respiratory impact
- Youth mental health is under siege—70% report some level of climate distress.
In these volatile contexts, healthcare leaders must step forward—not only as a pillar of society but as a powerful driver of adaptation, equity, and resilience. Leadership in health is no longer confined to quality metrics or service delivery; it must now navigate the interlocking crises of environmental breakdown, disinformation, and social fragmentation.
Modern health leadership must embrace radical collaboration and co-creation: removing silos, integrating across sectors, and focusing on prevention. We must think beyond hospitals and clinics—engaging with public health, infrastructure, housing, transportation, and communities to ensure equitable, climate-resilient systems. Additionally, it must engage with their health workforces to these ends.
Climate change has rendered our old assumptions obsolete. Systems built for yesterday’s threats falter under today’s pressures. Healthcare’s unique leverage point is its potential to prevent harm, but this requires investments in community infrastructure, a task made harder by post-pandemic exhaustion and chronic underfunding.
Despite these challenges, Canadian health leaders—from national associations, scientists to Indigenous organizations—have contributed plans for healthcare transformation. True leadership is distributed: it arises not just from titles rather from action. Evidence-informed, justice-rooted leadership can inspire change, even in complexity.
Among the most urgent threats we face is extreme heat. While sectors have made progress in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, the global emissions have not changed. National research confirms our health systems are not prepared for worsening heat, concluding adaption and resiliency development are urgently needed.
To address this, the Canadian Coalition for Green Healthcare and other partners including the Canadian Health Workforce have launched the Collaborative Transformation: Decreasing heat-health impacts in vulnerable populations using health delivery lenses grant funded project—targeting indoor heat in vulnerable populations through a four-year, four-part strategy:
- National Network for Indoor Heat Health
Build a network of health workers, community leaders, researchers, patients, care partners, and educators to share knowledge and accelerate climate adaptation in healthcare delivery.
- Facility Heat Assessments
Evaluate and improve the capacity of hospitals, long-term care, clinics, and home care to manage indoor heat. Pilot low-tech, evidence-based interventions and disseminate best practices, protecting patients, residents and the healthcare workforce.
- Outpatient and Client-Focused Interventions
Equip frontline health workers — from physicians to nurses to homecare workers — with tools and practices they can share with patients. Focus on those most vulnerable to indoor heat and test scalable strategies. Protect the physical and mental health of healthcare workforces by co-creating safe work environments.
- Community Engagement and Scenario Planning
Partner with local leaders to run workshops, co-design solutions, and engage in transformative scenario planning—a collaborative approach to envisioning and preparing for future climate-related health crises, including overlapping threats like wildfires, power outages, and disease outbreaks.
In a world rife with disruption and disinformation, health systems, leaders and workers can be beacons of trust, care, and innovation, but only if all rise to the moment with courage, clarity, and collaboration.
The future of health leadership lies not in perfection—but in purpose. In a turbulent world, the path forward begins with understanding complex systems and investment in cycles of collective action, study, and nimble course correction.