Catharina Giudice

View on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yT8JhJ2u8uQ

My name is Catharina Giudice. I am originally from Brazil from São Paulo in the Southeast. I moved around a lot, I’ve had many communities. Throughout my life I’ve spent a lot of time in Mexico and now I’m an Emergency Physician. I practice in the United States. I spent a lot of time in my medical training in Los Angeles. I would say that is my home. I practice emergency medicine, I see patients in a daily basis with a variety of complaints and have always been very concerned about the state of the health of our planet, how climate change is impacting our communities, and as a physician specifically, I’ve had the privilege to be able to see how climate change is impacting our patients directly from a health standpoint. I was in the emergency department, I see how we use so much, so many resources to be able to provide great care and was already very aware of how the health care system was involved in contributing to greenhouse gas emissions and resource utilization and was already very concerned about what we could do to minimize the impact that the Health Care system and Healthcare delivery was having in the planet but as an Emergency Physician taking care of patients directly, I started to see how climate change is already directly impacting the health of the patients that I care for and impacting my ability to deliver high quality care. In Los Angeles, I saw a lot of heat waves. When I was training in residency I saw some of the worst heat waves in Southern California history. I saw some of the worst wildfires. I took care of a lot of patients that were coming in with heat stroke, which is a life-threatening condition. I was responding to victims of wildfires that needed to be intubated, needed critical care, so really saw the direct impact of how climate change was impacting my community and my patients. I think most importantly as somebody that served in a county hospital where we took care of a lot of uninsured patients, I saw how vulnerable communities communities that are under resourced, that a lot of times live in poverty, that have a lot of social determinants of health, that are impacting their health outcomes are also the communities that were being impacted by climate change the most. I believe climate change is a social justice issue and that motivates me to do what I can as a physician, do my part to try to address the issues and do what what I can to advocate for the communities that are being most impacted. I believe that there’s so much that we can do as a medical community, as a society, to mitigate climate change and prepare ourselves in our Health Care Systems and our communities to be able to withstand the impacts of climate change.

The climate hazards that we’re already seeing that are likely, unfortunately, going to worsen in the future until we’re able to truly curb climate change and my call to action to everybody is that there’s something that we can all do. Even if you’re not immersed in the field, there’s so many opportunities to talk to your patients, talk to your communities, educate them on how climate change is impacting their health, and take steps every day in your daily life to try to protect your planet. Protect your environment. Minimize our individual impacts on carbon emissions and resource utilization. So I am inspired by the work that my colleagues are doing and hope that we can come together as a community to protect the health of our communities and our patients.