Meet some of our staff behind the Climate Change and Sustainability Roadmap

Aaron Miller
Director, Home Support Transformation Seniors
Specialized Care Transformation Team

As the director of Home Support Transformation, Aaron and his team navigate the impacts of climate change almost daily. When there’s a heat wave, wildfires or floods, making sure our clients are safe in their homes can be complex and challenging. Technology solutions are helping transform home support services and mitigate the effects of climate change.

Q. How will you be activating the Roadmap in your work?

When looking at climate change, it's really about understanding how we can support our most vulnerable members of our communities. How can we help people stay and live in their homes as long as possible?

Part of my work has to do with seasonal readiness planning, one of 20 actions prioritized in the Roadmap. A lot of the work my team is focused on has to do with heat planning. As we get older, we have a lot more trouble regulating our body temperatures. We do wellness checks to see how our clients are doing, and figure what we can do to make sure they’re safe.

During natural disasters like floods or wildfires, we track our clients’ locations using spreadsheets. As our next step, we are partnering with Digital Health to develop an online map for this tracking for future events so we can easily see if they are within evacuation or alert zones.

We also use an online scheduling system to optimize travel between clients, and to schedule our home support team. During the floods in Ashcroft, for example, we used this system to make sure our community health workers could still get to our clients, as some were cut off by the floods.

Q. What makes you hopeful for the future?

One of my personal missions is to help people live healthier lives. How can we help people live longer at home, stay close to their families, and remain in their communities? That’s the part that really excites me.

Hannah Rempel
Clinical Operations Manager, Surgical program, Vernon Jubilee Hospital &
Chair, Vernon Jubilee Sustainability Committee

Q. Talk about some of the environmental sustainability work you’ve been doing at Interior Health.

My Masters of Nursing thesis was on nurses' perspectives of citizen science and climate change. I interviewed 12 nurses here, mostly Vernon Jubilee Hospital staff, and we talked about their 2021 fire experiences, and how professionally and personally they responded with climate action. We also explored citizen science, which is often used to engage the community and to increase the depth and volume of data around something, for example the collection of water samples.

A colleague and I started the Sustainability Committee, which came out of the research that I did with the nurses. There’s been a groundswell at Vernon Hospital for sustainability. For example, a manager and educator passionate about recycling proposed a way to recycle an instrument used in laparoscopic surgery. We now keep 2,000 instruments out of the landfill a year.

Q. Tell us about your experience helping develop the Roadmap.

I was one of many voices there with expertise and passion. I felt like I was in a room full of giants, and it was great to see how that process works.

We had to take certain areas of health care and come forward with strategies, processes and even staffing considerations. The one I specifically remember was around clinical operations and acute care.

Q: What makes you hopeful for the future?

When I see a person start a sustainability initiative, it creates that momentum for the rest of us to follow. We're all doing our little piece. And I know it sounds cliché, but it really does add up.

Desirée Spenst
Manager, Administrative Services, Primary Care and Public Health
Chair, Kelowna Community Health & Services Centre Sustainability Committee

Q. Talk about some of the environmental sustainability work you’ve been doing at Interior Health.

I think sustainability is an integral part of the work that we're doing because health and climate are so closely linked. Our climate is definitely affecting our clients, communities and staff. 

What I’m most excited about right now is working on recycling and composting capacity at some of our community health sites. We have a small composting pilot project with two of our clinics, Rutland Aurora Health Centre and Outreach Urban Health

Q. Tell us about your experience helping develop the Roadmap.

I was really fortunate to be able to participate in the development of the Roadmap. I appreciate how the Roadmap will help us funnel our resources, give us direction and allows us to focus on the areas that we see as having the biggest impact. It’s also a blueprint for how I can incorporate sustainability into my work and integrate it into the services that we're offering.

Q. What makes you hopeful for the future?

What’s most hopeful for me is that as we start to do this work, the support for it comes out of the woodwork. I also like seeing how excited people get and how happy they are to see these changes being made.

Bringing people together for a cause that we feel is important, and being a good steward in our community, are important pieces to me. To be able to say and we're delivering health-care services in a sustainable way or working towards doing so, is very encouraging.

Jessie Stoney, RN
Community Integrated Care Coordinator
Chair, Invermere Sustainability Committee

Q. Talk about some of the environmental sustainability work you’ve been doing at Interior Health.

We started a wildflower project last fall at Invermere & District Hospital. Our committee planted native fire and deer-resistant species. The wildflowers reduce water use, increase pollination and provide a healing space for patients.

We also did Go By Bike Week in the spring which was super popular with the staff. We had awards for the people with the greatest reduction in carbon dioxide, and participation awards. We’ve hosted Earth Day BBQs with plant-based burgers, and other fun events.

We’re trying to do fun activities and projects to get people engaged in something that they want to do, as opposed to telling them what to do.

Q. Tell us about your experience helping develop the Roadmap.

It was an honour to be involved with it just because I am so passionate about sustainability. Being from a rural area, to me it’s all about using local resources because we don't use enough, especially food. We have all of this amazing food and gardening and greenhouses and stuff just down the road. I was happy to bring that perspective to the roadmap.

Q: What makes you hopeful for the future?

Just seeing the engagement and how people are picking up and running with things, and the willingness to shift their mindsets. Change is hard, especially when you're used to doing things a certain way for so long.

It was just so cool to know that we're not focusing on these things by ourselves. It’s nice to see that people are willing to work together and to make all these changes, no matter what department they are working in.

Nikki Hall
Coordinator, Central Functions, Kelowna General Hospital
Co-chair, Sustainability Committee

Q. Talk about some of the environmental sustainability work you’ve been doing at Interior Health.

One of our biggest projects at KGH has been recycling. We've also been investigating how to optimize the use of our heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems.

Q. Tell us about your experience helping develop the Roadmap.

I've done a lot of work with Environmental Sustainability team and our committee. We were invited to look at specific areas that we work in, and where we could provide expertise in developing actions for the Roadmap.

Being new to my role at that time, I took a lot in, and learned so much just hearing participants talk about their plans and their vision.

Q. What makes you hopeful for the future?

I have three young children. I want them to be able to enjoy the environment when they are my age with their kids. Through teamwork, we can leave them with a hopeful future.

Jenny Green
Team Leader
Healthy Community Development Team

Q. How will you be activating the Roadmap in your work?

As a team leader on the Healthy Community Development (HCD) team, I support my team’s collaboration with local governments and Aboriginal communities. This includes supporting my team in providing a population health lens to the development of community heat preparedness plans. We provide practical information that assists communities in developing and implementing equitable strategies to prepare for and respond to extreme heat.

Our team works with community planning teams to develop and implement long-range plans and policies that contribute to climate resiliency and adaptation actions. The co-benefits of this work address the social determinants or 'building blocks' of health such as housing, and the social, built and natural environments that shape healthy communities and well-being.

Q. What makes you hopeful for the future?

Climate change exacerbates existing inequities, impacting those who are most vulnerable to negative health outcomes. I observe in our work that community partners are coming together to prepare, plan and implement adaptation actions that consider the diverse needs of all community members.

These efforts and collaborative actions have the potential to improve community resilience – the capacity to bounce back, adapt, learn and transform. This is what makes me the most hopeful. While we may all be in the same storm, we aren’t always in the same boat. It takes a collaborative effort to address those factors that keep us well.