Integrating pharmaceutical pollution into healthcare decision-making
To reduce the impact of pharmaceutical pollution, one key leverage point for change is to include the environmental impact of pharmaceuticals within healthcare decision-making.
This includes decisions on which pharmaceuticals to license, approve for use in healthcare, procure, prescribe, and dispense. Currently, these decisions are made predominantly on clinical outcomes and economic cost and do not consider the environmental consequences of these drugs once they enter the environment.
Conducting a Life Cycle Assessment
One way to include environmental impacts into decision-making is to conduct a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). An LCA looks at the environmental impacts throughout the entire life of a product, from the sourcing of its raw ingredients, to its disposal and/or destruction. This gives a value of how environmentally friendly a product is, making it easier to compare different products.
Due to climate change and net zero targets, LCAs are increasingly being used across the pharmaceutical and healthcare sectors, but at the moment they only focus on the item’s carbon footprint, and do not consider the wider environmental impacts, for example the impacts of pollution and water/land use.
Including pharmaceutical pollution alongside carbon in LCAs is complex and difficult, but this is an important step in ensuring that healthcare decision-making accounts for the environmental impact of pharmaceuticals.
Three areas for attention
The Pharma Pollution Hub held a workshop to discuss the challenges and identify what is needed to help this process. We outlined three key areas for attention:
Addressing data gaps – We need more data across the pharmaceutical life cycle, especially for generic (older) medicines which are most commonly used in healthcare. We need increased transparency of manufacturing data, and better harmonisation of data collection across countries and sectors.
Uptake into the healthcare system – We need to work with all of the stakeholders involved at different decision-making points, to understand how and where LCA data could be effectively used, and understand the implications of this.
Galvanising public support – We need to generate greater public awareness and support for addressing the issue of pharmaceutical pollution, but we need to understand which messages and audiences are most effective and appropriate.
To find out more about the workshop discussions, the challenges and opportunities of integrating pharmaceutical pollution into LCAs, please read the full report. If you have any questions please get in touch by contacting PharmaPollutionHub@group.exeter.ac.uk.