Primary care sits at the centre of health system demand, where clinical decisions around prescribing, investigation, and follow-up significantly shape resource use and environmental impact. A substantial proportion of care delivered in this setting offers limited clinical benefit while contributing to overdiagnosis, patient harm, and avoidable system strain. Climate change is simultaneously increasing primary care demand through worsening air quality, wildfire smoke exposure, climate-sensitive infections, and mental health effects, while extreme weather events disrupt access to services and deepen health inequities. These pressures position primary care as a critical lever for both mitigation and adaptation.
Sustainable primary care is grounded in reducing unnecessary care, empowering patients, prioritizing prevention, and selecting lower-impact alternatives. Key approaches include reducing overtesting and overprescribing, addressing diagnostic creep, supporting deprescribing and antimicrobial stewardship, and using shared decision-making to avoid medicalization of normal human experience. Expanding non-pharmacologic care and virtual models can reduce travel and resource use. Clinic-level changes such as reducing single-use materials, rethinking infection control practices, and optimizing laboratory and prescribing practices further reduce environmental burden.
Sustainable transformation requires embedding planetary health into everyday primary care practice. Integrating Choosing Wisely principles, strengthening team-based longitudinal care, and improving information sharing can reduce duplication and low-value care. Coordinated action across clinicians, health systems, and policymakers is essential to deliver high-value, low-carbon care that improves outcomes and system resilience.
This document was authored by Dr. Ilona Hale and proudly supported by the East Kootenay Division of Family Practice and CASCADES Canada, a Government of Canada initiative.
This webinar presents a fireside chat hosted by CASCADES, the Indigenous Primary Health Care Council, and the Alliance for Healthier Communities. Panelists share insights on the role, responsibility, and capacity of the primary health care sector and health professionals in identifying and addressing climate change vulnerability and leading adaptation efforts. The discussion features Imara Rolston, Dakota Recollet, Selma Tobah, and Bev Taylor, and is moderated by Fiona Miller and Natasha Beaudin.
This webinar is part of the “Climate, Health, and Healthcare” speaker series for health professional learners. It features Ingrid Waldron, MA, PhD, who discusses environmental racism, environmental justice, and their impacts on the health of communities.
This webinar examines how medications, while essential to healthcare, have significant environmental impacts and can contribute substantially to healthcare’s carbon footprint, particularly in primary care. It explains that most prescriptions are written in primary care, creating an opportunity for more sustainable prescribing practices that combine patient-centred care with reduced environmental impact. The session in the Sustainable Primary & Community Care Implementation Series features Ilona Hale, a family physician with the East Kootenay Division of Family Practice and Assistant Clinical Professor at the University of British Columbia, and Trudy Huyghebaert, a clinical pharmacist with the University of Calgary and Alberta Health Services, who share prescriber and pharmacist perspectives on sustainable medication use.
An infographic for planetary health in primary care featuring four principles for environmentally sustainable healthcare: avoid unncessary care, empowering patients, choose environmental alternatives, shirt to prevention.
