Bringing planetary health into pharmacy education

Karen Cameron, Assistant Professor - Teaching Stream, and Ivy Lam, Assistant Professor (Status) and Academic Lead, Climate, Health & Sustainable Care (AL-CHSC) at the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy.

Ha-Ni Kim (2T5) had been interested in environmental issues and sustainability before she started the Doctor of Pharmacy (PharmD) program at the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy. As she progressed through the program, she began to think more about how she could implement sustainability in her own practice and raise awareness among fellow students and pharmacists.

“I’ve always been interested in the environment, climate change and the health care impacts. It’s important to raise awareness of how we can try to reduce our environmental impact, even within our own pharmacy practice,” says Kim, who now practices part-time in a community pharmacy and is an instructor in the Pharmacy Technician program at Centennial College. “Some of the waste we produce is unavoidable, but we can all be more conscious of the waste we produce and how we contribute to climate impacts.”

“It’s important to raise awareness of how we can try to reduce our environmental impact, even within our own pharmacy practice.”

The health care sector contributes an estimated 5 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, with the pharmaceutical industry and pharmacy profession major drivers of these emissions.

At the same time, pharmacists see patients who are experiencing the health impacts of a changing climate, from respiratory conditions due to reduced air quality to adverse reactions to extreme heat.

Kim had a unique opportunity to learn firsthand how the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy and University of Toronto teach sustainability and prepare the next generation of pharmacists to work within a changing climate through her work on the Faculty’s Planetary Health Report Card.

Supporting sustainability in health care is a key pillar of the Faculty’s current academic plan. Part of this pillar is to develop learning opportunities on sustainability in health care within the PharmD program and graduate studies – a focus of the report card.

Karen Cameron, assistant professor (teaching stream), and Ivy Lam, assistant professor (status) and academic lead for climate, health and sustainable care, are leading the development of environmental sustainability themes in the three-year PharmD curriculum, embedding the topic in most lecture-based and experiential courses.

“The experiential courses include learning objectives around pharmaceutical waste in practice, so these activities really help them apply the learnings at the pharmacy level,” says Cameron. “At the same time, we hope that by teaching students about sustainability in pharmacy practice, these learnings could also filter out to the pharmacy community.”

The specific topics that are being included have been informed in part by the Planetary Health Report Card.

Report card provides benchmarks to measure progress over time

Kim worked on the report card as part of one her non-direct patient care experiential courses in her fourth year of the PharmD program. The report card assigns “grades” based on how well the Faculty’s curriculum addresses specific environmental issues – for example, drug shortages due to climate change and the carbon footprint of the health care system – as well as the university’s student-led and campus environmental initiatives, with specific examples for each metric.

The Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy is the only pharmacy school in Canada to participate in the Planetary Health Report Card. U of T’s Lawrence Bloomberg Faculty of Nursing and Temerty Faculty of Medicine have also participated.

The report card notes that the Faculty and university are particularly strong in supporting interdisciplinary sustainability research through the Collaborative Centre for Climate, Health and Sustainable Care, where Lam is associate director and Cameron is a faculty fellow.

The areas that need the most improvement were mostly related to the curriculum, which is what Cameron and Lam are addressing.

“The report card provides measurable metrics so we can showcase to the world what we're doing.”

“While the report card wasn’t the only source that we used for the new curriculum, it was important in helping inform some of the topics that should be included in the three-year program,” says Cameron. “The report card provides measurable metrics so we can showcase to the world what we're doing.”

This is the first year the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy has participated in the report card, and as a result, the first metrics on a topic that has largely been unmeasured so far. But now with metrics and a better understanding of the topics important to cover, the Faculty can showcase areas where it excels and focus on improving where needed.

“The report card shows the faculty, students, and pharmacy community that we are committed to environmental sustainability. It provides public-facing evidence that we’re serious about this and we’re changing,” says Lam. “I believe that when we do the next assessment with the report card, it’s going to show that we have followed through with our commitment to this pillar.”