This playbook offers practical guidance and considerations for integrating social and nature prescribing into healthcare practices, fostering community partnerships, promoting high-impact programs, and better understanding the potential for environmental co-benefits of these programs. It is intended for health care providers, program administrators, link workers, researchers, educators, and anyone else interested in better understanding the environmental co-benefits of social and nature prescribing. Developed in collaboration with the Canadian Institute for Social Prescribing (CISP), a national hub anchored by the Canadian Red Cross, this playbook builds on a literature review and expert guidance to connect healthcare, social services, and community supports for improved health and well-being. The playbook aims to: Provide background information, resources, and considerations for guiding social and nature prescribing practices. Highlight how nature prescribing, as a variation of social prescribing, can generate significant environmental co-benefits.
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.
The Playbook provides background information, resources, and considerations for integrating vital Indigenous-led perspectives, values, and wisdom into the guidance for climate mitigation, adaptation, and resilience of pharmacy practice. These considerations have been compiled from a review of key literature, Indigenous-led health advocacy movements, and the perspectives, values and experiences of pharmacy and other health professionals with Indigenous ancestry. This Playbook is intended for Canadian pharmacy professionals including pharmacists, pharmacy technicians, pharmacy assistants, educators and trainees. Foundational considerations for pharmacy practice can be found in the “Climate Resilient, Low Carbon, Sustainable Pharmacy” Playbook.
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.
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.
This playbook contains background information, resources, and environmental considerations to guide healthcare clinicians, teams and institutions to improve environmental sustainability of pharmacies in Canadian healthcare institutions. It is intended for Canadian healthcare providers and administrators working in pharmacies of bed-based healthcare settings that are providing patient care, contributing to institutional policies, and making institutional changes. While the focus of this playbook centers around hospital pharmacies given the available evidence, the information is applicable to pharmacies in other bed-based facilities, including: long-term care facilities rehabilitation centres palliative care units
The Sustainable Hospital Pharmacy Scorecard helps teams: identify sustainability opportunities, establish a baseline and track progress on sustainability goals, and share metrics with the broader community to track collective progress.
