Congratulations to Kali Smolen, MD-PhD’26, who is one of four emerging clinical health leaders nationally to be awarded the Blair and Georgia Sadler Fellowship at Health Care Without Harm for their commitment to working toward equitable, climate-smart healthcare in their institutions and communities.
In addition to receiving a full scholarship to attend CleanMed, a national conference for leaders in health care sustainability, Smolen also received a grant to complete a project that demonstrates equitable, scalable solutions for climate-smart healthcare that can be broadly shared with the Geisel School of Medicine, Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center, and Upper Valley communities.
Smolen first learned about Health Care Without Harm and CleanMed, when she started medical school and was disappointed that the principles of waste reduction and creative utilization were not widely accepted in our healthcare system. She says she was immediately inspired by both organization’s efforts to reduce waste and identify innovative solutions in the realm of climate-smart healthcare.
She was also among three Geisel School of Medicine students who in 2021 created a local chapter of Medical Students for a Sustainable Future—a national student organization that recognizes climate change as an urgent threat to human health and social justice.
“As a future clinician who advocates for practicing medicine in a way that is not detrimental to the environment to achieve better health, it is wonderful to be honored in this way because our health is so closely tied to our environment,” Smolen says.
“The monetary award will help fund my waste-reduction project—a nitrile glove recycling program in the endoscopy suite at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center—based on a waste audit in January 2023 that started the conversation around this important topic.”
Together with one of her mentors in this space, Heiko Pohl, MD, a gastroenterologist at Dartmouth Hitchcock, she is also working on a life-cycle assessment of single-use devices to identify ways to reduce the climate impact of colonoscopies, which rely heavily on disposable instruments.
Healthcare decarbonization, which is dedicated to reducing the large volume of carbon emissions that healthcare generates, underlies Smolen’s work and aligns with her values. “As physicians who aim to ‘do no harm,’ we have an obligation to recognize the ways we are harming the health of our earth through conventional medical practices and view this as an opportunity and ethical obligation to innovate ways of practicing climate-smart health care,” she explains.
“The solutions are often small because they scale. For example, we discussed manufacturing solutions at the CleanMed conference. So often, solutions in medicine are about adding something, like adding a drug to a treatment regimen. But sometimes, the solutions are as easy as taking something that is not necessary away. One company highlighted how removing a piece of unnecessary, decorative thread from a product eliminated the carbon emissions equivalent to flying twice around the world. This is just one of many examples possible in healthcare.
“It is a massive problem that requires societal change, and it is something that I want to work on throughout my career.”
- Kali Smolen, MD-PhD’26
Each year, Health Care Without Harm selects an annual cohort of early-career clinicians—connecting them with each other, subject matter experts, and partner health systems to support fellows’ ideas and equip them with tools for climate and sustainability-related education, organizing, communications, research, and leadership skills they can use throughout their careers to mentor the next generation of clinical sustainability leaders.
“I am grateful for this fellowship because I can meet with people who are dedicated to talking about these issues and coming up sustainable solutions,” Smolen says. “Being paired with a mentor, I can gain a different perspective on projects or initiatives and learn about the strides mentors have made within their hospital systems. I am hopeful about what I will learn by the end of the year.”
