Vet Students Impacting Environmental Health - March Winner

Stephanie Schiavone from Colorado State explains what she does to help with environmental sustainability at her school and within the teaching hospital at CSU!

I am the lead student on a research project that focuses on environmental sustainability in a veterinary teaching hospital. We designed and sent out a survey to every AVMA accredited veterinary school with an associated teaching hospital on environmental sustainability in the workplace. The survey is designed to target all employees and students who are undergoing clinical rotations. Our purpose for designing this survey was in response to a different survey that was sent out to veterinary students on sustainability in their curriculum, which found that students wanted to learn more about the health of the planet. We wanted to target the employees and 4th year DVM students in clinical rotations to further understand how sustainability was being handled from the perspective of the people who spent the most time at the workplace. Our goals for this project are to discover where within the hospital there was a lot of non-sustainable waste being produced and how to better address it to see where changes can be made. Examples of some of the questions we asked include “How high of a priority should environmental sustainability be?” and “Select the top three areas you would be interested in helping to reduce the environmental footprint at your veterinary hospital”. Our hope with this study is to publish it to JVME so that we can start to make more sustainable changes in our hospitals and design a better future for ourselves and all other living beings on earth.