About Pharmacy and Prescribing
Pharmaceuticals generate environmental impacts across their lifecycle, from manufacturing to production to disposal. Climate-related events have increasingly affected both access to medications and availability of medications, highlighting the importance of sustainable and resilient pharmacy practices.
Environmental sustainability and clinical quality are complementary objectives. Achieving meaningful impact requires system-level change across hospital pharmacy operations, including both medication management and clinical pharmacy services. Pharmacy leaders play an important role in supporting and coordinating these efforts. Sustainability opportunities include inventory optimization, formulary and procurement decisions, waste segregation, and prescribing practices across inpatient and outpatient settings.
CASCADES playbooks and supporting resources bring together evidence-informed tools and resources to support the integration of environmental sustainability into pharmacy and prescribing. These sustainability initiatives promote operational and clinical change, including quality improvement approaches and prescribing and waste management strategies, and are intended to support implementation, evaluation, and spread of change ideas within health systems
Implementation Resources for Pharmacy and Prescribing
Webinars
Weaving Indigenous Perspectives into Pharmacy Practice
Métis pharmacist Amy Lamb, Executive Director of the Indigenous Pharmacy Professionals of Canada, shared her experiences supporting pharmacy services to Indigenous communities as a front-line pharmacy professional and systems advocate. This webinar focused on the experiences of community pharmacies building sustainable distribution to rural and remote communities and navigating health access during climate emergencies. It shared stories and lived experiences from pharmacy professionals and Indigenous community members as they navigated pharmacy and broader health access. It also highlighted the importance of land in the holistic healing of Indigenous communities, emphasizing its role in structural determinants of health and the impacts of environmental racism.
Environmental Sustainability in Pharmacy: Approaches from Canadian Leaders
In this video, Canadian leaders discuss approaches to environmental sustainability in Pharmacy. Hosted by Fiona Miller, University of Toronto, Dalla Lana School of Public Health, speakers include: Shellyza Sajwani, The Ottawa Hospital, Celia Culley, Vancouver Island Health Authority, Terri Drover, Health Products Stewardship Association, Tarek Hussein, Weller Pharmacy.
Hospital Pharmacies and the Climate Crisis
This video features the Canadian Coalition for Green Health Care, PEACH Health Ontario, and CASCADES welcoming Dr. Shellyza Moledina Sajwani, who provides an overview of the relevance of climate change to pharmacy practice. It focuses on practical, actionable objectives that can be implemented within hospital pharmacy settings, using the Ottawa Hospital Pharmacy Environmental Stewardship Committee as an example of environmental stewardship in practice.