Infectious diseases (Barna et al, 2012).
Increasingly, students expect sustainability to form a component of their university experience, and higher-education institutions will need to respond to this (National Union of Students, 2018).
Cruz et al (2018) conducted research in four Arabic-speaking countries and found student nurses had positive attitudes towards including sustainability in the nursing curriculum. Similarly, student nurses in the UK – who, initially, had limited awareness of sustainability and the climate crisis in healthcare and, therefore, did not see the relevance of this topic for their education – demonstrated greater awareness following relevant educational interventions (Richardson et al, 2019).
Study design and methods
Given the increasing public awareness of the climate crisis and environmental damage, our study aimed to investigate student nurses’ attitudes about the crisis and sustainability at the start of their undergraduate studies in 2019 and compare them with those of student nurses starting their degree programme in 2014. Our objectives were to: