Sustainable primary and community care
Comprehensive, person-centered, sustainable primary and community care can support health and wellbeing, and reduce the need for more resource intensive services.
Upcoming training and events
Implementation resources for sustainable primary and community care
Social and nature prescribing: Considerations for health and environment
Sustainable Occupational Therapy
Occupational therapy can contribute to transitioning current healthcare systems towards high-quality, low-carbon, sustainable and climate-resilient care. Here, find background information, resources, and considerations to guide more sustainable and climate-resilient occupational therapy.
Primary Care Toolkit
Highlighting ways practitioners can integrate sustainability into their clinical work in primary care settings.
Planetary health lens for primary care, by Ilona Hale, Samantha Green, Meghan Davis and Jessica Nowlan in
Climate Conscious Inhaler Prescribing in Outpatient Care
A step-by-step guide to more sustainable inhalers in primary care
More resources on sustainable primary and community care
Exam table paper
Resources created by the London Health Sciences Centre. Shared with permission.
Reducing healthcare waste by eliminating exam table paper in a primary care practice: a sustainable quality improvement initiative, by Ilona hale and Amanda McKenzie. BMJ Open Qual. 2024 Oct 28;13(4):e002838. doi: 10.1136/bmjoq-2024-002838. PMID: 39467618; PMCID: PMC11529457.
Event recordings
Playlist
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Sustainable primary and community care projects in development
Heat Resilience for Primary Care
This project will produce a guide for Primary Care providers to introduce extreme heat events in Canada, outline the risks of heat on human health and healthcare, and discuss current responses to heat events. The playbook will describe tools and strategies for change including social prescribing, medication management, and social supports
PI: Aileen Liu, Pharmacy Resident, University Health Network
We want to hear from you
Materials created by CASCADES are shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International Public License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).
While it is not a requirement under the license, we would be grateful if you would let us know where and how you use, share or adapt our materials.
Other action areas
Care pathways
Key actions can minimize the environmental harms of medications throughout their lifecycle and address increased medication-related risks due to climate change.
Many opportunities exist to address the resource intensity of perioperative care while ensuring and promoting high quality care.
Comprehensive person-centered primary and community care can support health and wellbeing and reduce the need for more resource intensive services.
Practitioners across specialties can take meaningful steps to reduce the environmental impacts of their practice and safeguard patient and population health.
Health services can promote health, including by delivering healthy food, effective chronic disease management, and climate-adapted clinical care.
System enablers
Sustainability is intrinsically linked with both quality care and patient safety and can be embedded within these efforts.
Leadership and good governance are needed to develop and deliver effective climate and sustainability strategy.
The shift to climate resilient and sustainable health systems requires accurate assessment of healthcare’s environmental impacts.
Health systems can leverage their purchasing power to influence vendors and shape markets for sustainable and resilient health sector products and services.
Healthy food, digital innovation and effective waste management are among the key enablers of low-carbon, sustainable and climate-resilient health systems.