Pharmacy Daily | Teaming up for the planet

COLLABORATIONS for planetary health was the theme of this year's APC Sansom Lecture.

Speaking at the National Film and Sound Archives in Canberra earlier this week, the University of Melbourne's Professor Tina Brock explored how health professionals can work across disciplines to address the challenges of planetary health.

Titled 'Burning down silos: Collaborations for planetary health', Professor Brock's lecture considered the environmental impacts of the healthcare and the pharmaceutical industries.

"If healthcare was a country, it would be fifth largest emitter of greenhouses gasses in the world," she told the audience.

"If you look at what's happening in healthcare, it would be the equivalent of 514 coal burning factories running non-stop.

"I think if you read in the paper the news about a coal burning factory, you would be alarmed, and yet every day in the jobs that we do, we are contributing to that and this occurs for pharmacy all across the whole lifecycle -- everything from chemistry, how we are discovering and manufacturing drugs, to how we use drugs."

Professor Brock expressed admiration and hope in the future generations, and how they have inspired her and her colleagues.

Together with people from Australia, the US, Canada and the UK, Professor Brock was involved with RX for Climate.

"This is a grassroots alliance, a loose collective of people who are learning about this and sharing what they learned freely, under a Creative Commons licence.

"This was absolutely being led by these passionate early career pharmacists, who were amazing."

She also talked about the Planetary Health Report Card, an initiative that involves not just pharmacy students, but those from medicine, nursing, dentistry and physiotherapy.

"These students are evaluating their campuses, their programs, and their practices, and they're giving us a rating," she said.

"I love it because they are creating the future that they want to see." KB