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Collaborations for planetary health was the theme at the Australian Pharmacy Council (APC) 2024 Emeritus Professor Lloyd Sansom AO Distinguished Lecture Series.
Titled 'Burning down silos: Collaborations for planetary health', Professor Tina Brock's lecture explored the environmental impacts of healthcare and pharmaceuticals, and how working together will be the catalyst for change.
Reflecting on Prof Brock's lecture, APC Chair, Prof Sarah Roberts-Thomson, said the APC was honoured to hear from such an esteemed leader in planetary health and interprofessional collaboration.
"The lecture is always a highlight on the pharmacy calendar. We are honoured to have a leader of Prof Brock's calibre share her journey, learnings and research on this incredibly important issue. Her emphasis on leadership from future generations and the need to work together left many of us in the room inspired to do the best we can.
"I am excited to see the role that pharmacy education will play in meeting these challenges."
Drawing attention to the scale at which healthcare is contributing to climate issues, Prof Brock emphasised the importance of working together to tackle this issue.
"If healthcare was a country, it would be fifth largest emitter of greenhouses gasses in the world.
"If you look at what's happening in healthcare, it would be the equivalent of 514 coal burning factories running nonstop. I think if you read in the paper the news about a coal burning factory, you would be alarmed, and yet every day in the jobs that we do, we are contributing to that and this occurs for pharmacy all across the whole lifecycle - Everything from chemistry, how we are discovering and manufacturing drugs, to how we use drugs.
Prof Brock expressed admiration and hope in the future generations, and how they have inspired her and her colleagues.
"I was the old matriarch working with relatively young people in Australia, the US, Canada, the UK to develop RX for Climate. This is a grassroots alliance - a loose collective of people who are learning about this and sharing what they learned freely, under a Creative Commons licence. This was absolutely being led by these passionate early career pharmacists, who were just amazing.
"The National Academy of Medicine has recently come out and said health professions need to work together. Let's develop these standards together. Let's work together towards planetary health and sustainability.
"And the most exciting bit of this is the students are holding us accountable. There's an initiative called the Planetary Health Report Card, and it's not just pharmacy students. It's medicine, it's nursing, it's physio, it's dentistry, and that's growing every year. These students are evaluating their campuses, their programs, and their practices, and they're giving us a rating. I love it because they are creating the future that they want to see.
"It's going to get harder before it gets easier, but it will get better. We have got to make it through the hard stuff first. Some of the hard stuff is the practitioners and educators being humble enough to be led by people perhaps more junior in their careers and processes. With us to be open, to be vulnerable across the health professions, and to work together to cool down this planet.
