Climate Corner: Greening your practice

One of this Division’s strategic priorities is to “…explore how we can influence the impact of healthcare on the environment”. As a sector, healthcare is a huge emitter of greenhouse gases (GHGs) accounting for some 5% of Canada’s total output. Globally, if healthcare were considered a country, it would be the fifth largest emitter of GHGs on the planet.

In turn, climate change negatively impacts human physical and emotional wellbeing, from respiratory, cardiovascular and heat related illness to changing patterns of infectious disease and food insecurity. This relationship, between human health and the natural systems that sustain us, is broadly termed planetary health.

In family medicine we have a huge opportunity to be a part of climate solutions. With some 1300 Division members in Vancouver, and the hundreds of thousands of patients on whom we have influence, small changes can have large cumulative effect.

Practicing medicine with a ‘planetary health’ lens has many of the same elements that we consider to be part of good primary care. Things like deprescribing unnecessary medications, avoiding repeat or low-value diagnostics, encouraging healthy behaviours, and addressing social determinants of health are good for our patients and good for the planet.

In upcoming Climate Corner posts, we’ll dive more deeply into some ways of ‘greening your practice’, incremental changes that you and your patients can make to support the planet and improve health. In the meantime I encourage you to check out some of these resources to learn more:

• Cascades Sustainable Primary Care Toolkit
• Choosing Wisely Canada – Family Medicine
• EAT-Lancet Commission
• College of Family Physicians of Canada – Social Prescribing