Advancing towards an Environmental Health savvy healthcare workforce: knowledge in Basque nurses

Background

Nurses can play a vital role in the protection of the communities they serve from the impacts of environmental exposures and climate change hazards. However, the international literature shows that their Environmental Health (EH) knowledge and skills are limited.

Methods

Practicing nurses participated in a cross-sectional study conducted in the Basque Country, Spain. A questionnaire was distributed to participants via mailing lists of nurses working in different healthcare settings. We recruited 250 practicing nurses (91.2% women, mean age 40.5 years) who completed a questionnaire that allowed us to describe their EH knowledge and competences and to study the role of potential sociodemographic (e.g., age, sex) and psycho-environmental (e.g., nature relatedness, CC concerns and anxiety) predictors. Using a DAG-centered approach, multiple regression models were adjusted to identify the associations between predictors and EH knowledge and competences.

Results

Only a 43.2% of the sample felt capable of defining EH. 26.4% declared a sufficient level of training. EH knowledge and competences scores were moderate (16.2 out of 33, and 2.1 out of 4), respectively. However, nursing staff showed interest in receiving training in EH (7.6 out of 10), although identified several barriers to acquiring this knowledge or incorporating it into their practice. EH knowledge was positively predicted by environmental concerns and by climate anxiety. Higher scores for EH competences were associated with higher scores in climate anxiety. Nature relatedness was marginally associated with both outcomes (p = 0.10).

Conclusions

Our results underline the need to focus on the training of nurses, as well as supporting the relationship with nature and concern about environmental problems from a positive coping perspective

Key messages

• Nurses are key professionals to tackle environmental hazards in their clinic and community practice but further EH training is needed.

• Climate change concerns and climate anxiety could be actioned to increase healthcare professionals EH knowledge and competences.