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Planetary Health Report Card

Estimated timings:
1-2 months to set up & run the project (steps 1-4)
6-12 months to complete the project (step 5)

Can be done by any health professional student in their medical or allied healthcare school

Green Impact for Health Toolkit area: Special Award

PHRC Areas

  • Planetary Health Curriculum
  • Interdisciplinary Research
  • Institutional Support
  • Community Outreach and Advocacy
  • Campus Sustainability

On this page

The benefits of this project

Project benefits for Your Patients

Benefits for Your Patients

  • Future clinicians learning about sustainable healthcare
Project benefits for Your Practice

Benefits for Your Practice

  • Enables clinical students to enter the workforce with a greater understanding of planetary health
  • Supports the NHS goal of net zero emissions by 2045
Project benefits for The Planet

Benefits for The Planet

  • Encourages planetary health education for current clinical students
  • Evaluates current campus sustainability
  • Engagement with the local community
  • Improves understanding of carbon footprint calculations

Opportunity for improvement

  • The Planetary Health Report Card (PHRC)aims to provide a metric-based tool for evaluating and improving planetary health content in health professional schools. Each participating institution has a student-led (and faculty-supported) team to fill out the report card and identify opportunities for improvement, reaching out to relevant staff and faculty along the way.
  • The PHRC was first run in 2019, with the aim of each institution repeating the report card annually to track progress. It evaluates the planetary health curriculum, but also includes a range of questions to assess other areas of the institution.
  • The card allows institutions to track their progress and share examples of best practice. This has a long-term benefit in educating future health care workers but also incentivises more immediate change, such as campus sustainability and increasing community outreach projects.
  • This project outlines how healthcare students can encourage their university to engage with the PHRC.
  • You might like to create a SMART goal for this project, e.g. to join or build a PHRC team at your university within 1 month.

How to carry out this project

  1. Check if your university has completed a Planetary Report Card

    Click on this link to see if they have submitted evidence for the Planetary Report Card 2026 summary and to see what score they achieved.

  2. Get in contact (if your university has already been part of the planetary health report card)

    If your university has already been part of the planetary health report card, then a good first person to reach out to would be the faculty mentor for the previous year’s card. This is listed on the front page of your institute’s report card, which can be found on the PHRC website. You will need a university mentor to complete the PHRC.

    If they are unable to reply, then it’s worth contacting the PHRC team directly, who will be able to put you in touch with your regional lead.

    As it is a university evaluation project, contact your Dean or sustainability lead as well before starting the card. They are often a great person to get you in contact with the wider green team at the university.

  3. Suggested email to send to your Dean if your university has signed up before

    Resource: Suggested email to send to your Dean if your university has signed up before

    We are writing to you about a project we are hoping to do within the medical school, which involves completing the Planetary Health Report Card (PHRC) for the University this year. The PHRC (https://phreportcard.org/) is an international student-led, faculty-mentored initiative that evaluates an institution on improving planetary health content, specifically in health professional schools. It aims to annually evaluate the Medical School’s planetary health curriculum, interdisciplinary research, institutional support, community outreach and advocacy, and campus sustainability. In each of these sections, the students are to identify opportunities for improvement and reach out to relevant staff and faculty along the way. We know our University took part in …, …. and …, but we did not complete a card last year. We were hoping to review the card and complete it for this academic year so we can see what progress we have made, and would like your permission to do this. If you are interested and happy for us to go ahead with the project, we were also wondering if you knew any faculty members who are interested in planetary health and sustainability. Thank you for your support,

  4. Get in contact (if your university has not been part of the planetary health report card before)

    If your institute has not been part of the planetary health report card before, then the first people to contact are your sustainability lead and Dean to bring the idea to them. You will need to find a university mentor to work with you on the PHRC.

    After that, contact the PHRC team directly, who will be able to put you in contact with the regional lead. The report card is the same if you have not done previous cards, but (as you won’t have previous cards for your institute to look at), it might be worth checking out some other university cards from previous years to see the kind of evidence and ideas that they have used.

  5. Resource: Suggested email to your Dean if your university has not signed up before

    We are writing to you about a project that we are hoping to do within the medical school. This involves completing the Planetary Health Report Card (PHRC) for the University. The PHRC (https://phreportcard.org/) is an international student-led, faculty-mentored initiative that evaluates an institution on improving planetary health content, specifically in health professional schools. It aims to annually evaluate the Medical School’s planetary health curriculum, interdisciplinary research, institutional support, community outreach and advocacy, and campus sustainability. In each of these sections, the students are to identify opportunities for improvement and reach out to relevant staff and faculty along the way. We were hoping to sign up and complete it for this academic year so we can increase our visibility in this area and see what score we receive. If you are interested and happy for us to go ahead with the project, we were wondering if you knew any faculty members who are interested in planetary health and sustainability? Thank you for your support,

  6. Resource: Suggested email to send to the PHRC team

    Dear Planetary Health Report Card Team, My name is ….. and I am a …. year medical student at …… We were hoping to complete the report card for our university this year. Our faculty mentor, Dr ____  has kindly agreed to support us this year. Are you still looking for student leads for 2026? Many thanks,

  7. Build a team

    The report takes an estimated 10-20 hours to complete, so it is best to build a team. Around four people is recommended, but it is possible to complete the card with a team of two. It’s useful to have a team in a range of years if possible, as the report card evaluates all years, not just one.

  8. Complete the report

    Register interest in the report card in late August and September.

    There will be an online Q&A in autumn, and additional guidance available on the Googlesite once the card is underway.

    The first draft is usually due in February, when the PHRC team will look over it, make some comments and then the final draft is due in March.

Top tip

While the time taken to research and complete the project is 10-20 hours, the longest delays often come from waiting for email responses.

It’s worth getting in contact earlier (ideally before Christmas) to make emailing as stress-free as possible – have a read through the report and identify which questions you think you will need to email about.

How to scale this project up or down

You could upscale this project by supporting other universities that offer medical and allied healthcare courses to complete the report card. 

The Planetary Health Report Card also collaborates with Brighton and Sussex Medical School on the Sustainable Healthcare Academic and Research (SHARE) Conference, which is a free online conference hosted annually. There are also opportunities for poster presentations based on your findings and proposals from completing the report. 

Case study

Completing the Planetary Health Report Card was a great chance to learn and connect with the other sustainability teams at Exeter Uni. It was uplifting to know what else was being done, and a good spring board to join other projects as well.

The report was a bit daunting at first, but everyone we reached out to was helpful and happy to talk. The report card breaks the project down into smaller questions, so it’s easy to use and not too overwhelming.

Alex Parker, Exeter University Medical School

Have you completed this QIP?

Tell us a little about your project and enter your data to generate a certificate showing what you have achieved. It would be interesting to include the answers to these questions:

  1. Had you heard of the Planetary Health Report Card before reading this QIP?
  2. How did you find your experience of doing the PHRC?
  3. Any other comments or aspects we could add to this article?
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