Health Professionals’ Environmental Health Literacy

Health care providers play an important role in communicating health risks to patients, community residents, and public health agencies. For their own patients, the role of the provider could include taking an environmental health (EH) history, answering patient questions about exposures, providing anticipatory guidance to prevent exposures, and remaining alert to the possibility of toxicants or other environmental influences causing acute or chronic illness. However, few clinicians feel confident in discussing environmental risks, although patients rate them of high concern. There is ample evidence from clinician surveys and case reports of EH trainings to show that health professionals are not sufficiently literate in EH. This is also evident in community-engaged research projects. Lack of training and knowledge on the links between environment and health and lack of available clinical tools for both provider and patient education contribute to the inattention to this topic in the clinical, public health, and community settings. Health professionals likely have no experience in dealing with local officials and the general public in affected communities, nor with outside agencies, yet they may be called upon to give information and guidance to those parties that extend beyond their own patients. In this sense, they become part of a broader public health network in which the community is the patient. This chapter reviews health professionals’ current environmental health literacy (EHL) from the academic to community arenas, and focuses on examples of success and opportunities for expansion.