About
Dr Rita Issa (MBBS BSc MPH MRCGP FRSA) is a medical doctor, climate-health researcher, and communicator bridging science, systems thinking, and wisdom traditions for the flourishing of people and the planet.
She works with a central premise that human health is inseparable from the health of our relationships, with ourselves, our communities, and within nature and place. In recognising this interconnection, new pathways emerge for how individuals, organisations and communities can address their own healing, design systems, respond to crises, and build futures where people and ecosystems thrive.
As a thought leader and founder, Rita sits on the BMJ Commission for the Future of the NHS and is the co-founder of both planet:health, a lab and gathering advancing planetary health by bridging disciplinary divides, and Unexia, a platform for decentralised public goods health financing. She led the World Health Organisation’s COP29 report Health is the Argument for Climate Action.
As an academic and author, she holds research fellowships at the Harvard FXB Center for Health and Human Rights, the UEA School of Global Development, and the UCL Institute for Global Health. She is co-editor of the BMA Book of the Year The Handbook of Refugee Health, and the forthcoming Oxford University Press volume Health, Activism and Resistance. She publishes academically on health, climate change, nature-connection, migration, technology and futures. She has taught a number of courses, including at Harvard, NYU, UCL, and community-based sessions.
As a clinician, Rita practises as a primary care physician in a community with high health need and poverty in London. The innovative practice takes a holistic approach to provide whole-person care on the NHS and was the birthplace of social prescribing. She previously worked as a humanitarian doctor in refugee response, primarily in Lebanon with MSF, and aboard the Greenpeace ship Arctic Sunrise.
Within public communications, Rita’s work has appeared on BBC Radio 4, BBC News, Sky News, Novara Media and more. As a columnist for the Independent, she writes on the intersections of health, politics, and climate change. Her media and communications work, spanning grassroots movements to the UN, mainstream to social media, has reached millions.
She was recognised by the Mayor of London as Sustainability Changemaker of the Year, and as a BMJ Top 100 Women in Health Leadership.
Otherwise, Rita lives in a community in London, plays the violin - currently and most notably with the Middle Eastern Jazz group Makam Salam, and dances whenever she can.