The community health nurse sits across from Elena Martinez in the clinic's small exam room. Elena is 58, works overnight stocking shelves at a warehouse, lives with her daughter and two grandchildren in a neighborhood where summer temperatures inside apartments regularly hit the low 90s. She's here for her quarterly diabetes check, but the nurse has started asking different questions this year.
"During the heat wave last month, did you notice your blood sugar being harder to control?"
Elena nods. "I was so tired. Couldn't think straight. Thought it was just the heat."
The nurse uses brief clinical moments to connect environmental exposures and health impacts, carving out time during each visit to deliver proactive messages from a trusted contact.
Heat increases risk of cardiovascular, respiratory, renal, and mental health problems. For someone managing diabetes, sustained heat exposure can affect medication effectiveness, hydration status, and the body's ability to regulate blood sugar. But most patients don't know this connection. Most providers don't ask about it.
The nurse is using the "one minute for the planet" concept —carving out time during each patient visit to connect environmental exposures and health impacts and encourage protective actions. Health screening. History taking. Management of long-term conditions. Multiple touchpoints where she can deliver proactive messages from a trusted contact that may help people take action to protect their own health.
She explains to Elena how to recognize early heat stress symptoms, when to modify activity, how to adjust medication timing during heat waves. She asks about air conditioning. Elena shakes her head.
"Too expensive to run. We use fans."
Patient education meets systemic barriers here. AC use varies significantly by race, ethnicity, and poverty level in Chicago. The education provides agency within constraints. The constraints remain.
Elena leaves with information she didn't have before:
- Check blood sugar more frequently during heat waves
- The library three blocks away has air conditioning and stays open until 8 PM
- Which symptoms mean calling the clinic immediately rather than waiting
The clinical guidance exists. The CDC developed resources to help clinicians keep at-risk individuals safe when temperatures rises. There are educational programs training nurses on climate health. The tools are available. But institutional adoption lags behind what patients are experiencing now.
So the nurse focuses on what she can control: the conversation with the person in front of her.
When wildfire smoke blanketed the Midwest in June 2025, she was already having these conversations. Marcus, a 45-year-old with asthma, came in during the smoke event with worsening symptoms. She'd taught him months earlier to check air quality indexes, to adjust his medication before symptoms escalated, to recognize when inflammation was building. He'd downloaded the monitoring app she recommended. When the smoke arrived, he increased his controller medication and stayed inside. He still needed a clinic visit, but he avoided the emergency department.
Earlier contact with doctors produces better outcomes during respiratory emergencies. The fine particulate matter triggers inflammation in airways, aggravating underlying COPD and asthma. But patients often wait too long to seek care. The education happens before the crisis, in fragments of clinical time.
The constraint is reach. She can educate the patients she sees during her shifts, but climate health impacts are population-level problems. Chicago saw 151 heat-related deaths between 2000-2023, with deaths higher among males, non-Latiné Blacks, and older adults. Individual patient education reaches the people in her exam room. The systemic inequities that shape who has access to air conditioning, who can afford to modify their living conditions, who works outdoors without heat protections—those require different interventions.
She sees this daily. The construction worker who knows to hydrate and take breaks but whose boss doesn't provide shade or enforce rest periods. The family who monitors air quality during wildfire smoke but can't decide whether to miss work or keep kids home from school because they're living paycheck to paycheck. The older adults who understand heat stress symptoms but live alone in apartments without AC because that's what they can afford.
Communities are already adapting. Elena mentioned that her daughter checks on elderly neighbors during heat waves, brings them cold drinks, invites them to sit in front of the one window unit they run in the living room. Marcus knows which days to avoid his morning run based on air quality forecasts. The nurse's education fits into what communities are already doing to survive. She's providing information that helps people refine strategies they've already started implementing.
She's expected to integrate climate resilience work into an already overstretched role, frequently without remuneration or recognition. Patient education about climate health happens in the margins of clinical time designed around other priorities. It requires staying current on evolving research—understanding that wildfire smoke affects mental health as well as respiratory function, that heat waves increase emergency room visits for mental health reasons, that vector-borne diseases are appearing in new patient populations.
Colleagues are pushing for institutional protocols. Standardized heat illness screening during triage. Air quality monitoring that triggers clinical interventions. Climate risk assessment integrated into patient history-taking. She understands their strategy. She's just made a different calculation about what's possible within current constraints.
Institutional protocol changes require sustained advocacy through bureaucratic processes that may take years. Patients are experiencing climate health impacts now. She's addressing immediate needs with tools she controls—her knowledge, her relationship with patients, her ability to deliver clear messages from a trusted source.
The tradeoff is accepting limited reach and the reality that individual protective actions face systemic barriers. Teaching Elena to recognize heat stress symptoms happens in the same healthcare system that lacks standardized protocols for managing heat emergencies. A study in Pakistan found that educational training on heat emergencies improved healthcare providers' diagnosis and management practices—but providers, although aware of heat's health effects, feel less prepared to deal with it. Patient education helps individuals protect themselves. The healthcare system's unpreparedness creates risks that individual knowledge can't overcome.
She focuses on patient education because it's what she can do now. Waiting for comprehensive system change means patients navigate climate health risks without information that could help them survive.
Next week, she'll see Elena again for a follow-up. She'll ask how the heat management strategies are working. She'll see Marcus for his asthma check and ask about the air quality app. She'll meet new patients and have the same conversations—connecting environmental exposures to health impacts, teaching protective actions, working within the constraints that shape what's possible.
Each conversation is a fragment of protection in a system that hasn't caught up yet.