EHJ April 2003, pages 118-119 David Walton talks to EHJ about the need for sustainable development awareness training in schools and businesses

Last month, EHJ ran a special focus issue on sustainable development and public health. One of the main areas under discussion was the need for a greater role for environmental health practitioners (EHPs) in improving the health and wellbeing of local communities. But sustainable development awareness is not just crucial to those working in the environmental health profession, it is also vital to those businesses and individuals that EHPs come into contact with on a daily basis.

In order to plug a perceived gap in basic sustainable development awareness training, Chadwick House Group Ltd set about developing a course that aimed to introduce the subject of sustainability in an accessible and understandable format, avoiding jargon. "Chadwick House Group Ltd was already producing courses on environmental awareness and environmental management," explains David Walton, CIEH trustee and director of Kew Environment and Training Consultancy, and I suggested that they might want to do something on sustainability."

Having written a proposal for a basic level course, CHGL was not convinced at the time that there was a market for it, so a course was eventually created as a three-hour taster session. "If this is successful," Mr Walton says, "the plan is to upgrade it to a tested certificated course sometime in the future."

This particular training course has been in the pipeline for some time now. "I first started work on it over two years ago now," he says, "and it was published in September last year." Tested during the development stage in two schools, the very wide brief of the project made the course quite difficult to write. "Sustainable Development Awareness is squarely aimed at schools, businesses and the NHS," explains Mr Walton. "With the creation of Primary Care Trusts, the NHS was given the brief to train its staff in sustainability issues, so there was seen to be a market there for this type of course."

The course looks at sustainability from a historical perspective, and then concentrates on the three core issues in sustainable development - the links between the environment, the economy and society - showing some of the problems facing the world today, and the reasoning behind the need for adopting a different approach to business, education and lifestyle choices. "Initially, the course paints quite a gloomy picture I guess, mainly outlining problems," says Mr Walton. "The second part of the course flips more positively. It looks again at the three subjects and outlines simple exercises that people can take away and apply to any business setting."

The course gives people examples of different approaches to decision making and aims to help participants to think about how their decision making affects the workplace. "People should leave the course with a set of tools that can be applied anywhere to help then in the business world," he goes on. "I would never say that they will be 'sustainable' after attending the course, but it will put them down the path to a more sustainable life." Hopefully, people attending the course will leave with an understanding that decisions cannot be taken in isolation, and that the full consequences of each decision should be considered in advance.

"I firmly believe that we are the only profession at the moment in a unique position, able to take a sustainable view of what is going on," asserts Mr Walton. "This is what we have always done, it's just that we haven't called it this before. There is nothing new about sustainability. It's always been there, but perhaps we just moved away from it in the drive to industrialisation." Mr Walton clearly believes that the principles of sustainable development are integral to traditional environmental health work. "Perhaps it is just about getting CIEH members to step back from focusing on food, or other specific functions, and say 'hey, how does this fit into the bigger picture?'"

EHPs have already got the right skills, he points out, it is simply a question of utilising them for the greater good. "Ian Gray's vision statement fits in perfectly to this agenda," he says. "If the new environmental health courses take this more sustainable slant, environmental health practitioners in four to six years' time will be prepared for the public health agenda." He stresses that increasingly the career life for EHPs is becoming fairly limited in local authorities: "We have skills that are useable in a wider arena than just local authorities, that can be used in the higher level of directing the health agenda.

"If you cut sustainability right back to its bare bones," he says, "it's nothing more than what environmental health was created to deal with in the 19th century, when questions were asked about why people became ill and links were made with the water supply, housing conditions and employment conditions. So there is nothing new about all this. It's just taking environmental health back to its roots."

David Walton is a CIEH trustee and director of Kew Environment and Training Consultancy Ltd. E-mail: David@kew-environment.co.uk

For further details of the Sustainable Development Awareness training pack, or other courses in the CIEH training portfolio, please contact the CHGL centre support team on tel: 020 7827 5880, e-mail: centre support@chgl.com or visit the web: www.cieh.org