Environmentally Sustainable Primary Care

This practical guide, for primary care, provides a context-specific introduction to the sustainability challenges associated with good healthcare delivery and provides easy-to-implement yet impactful actions that can be taken to reduce and mitigate the impact of primary care on the living world. This practical guide for primary care provides a context-specific introduction to the sustainability challenges associated with good health-care delivery and provides easy-to-implement yet impactful actions that can be taken to reduce and mitigate the impact of primary care on the living world while also looking at the impact of the changing planet on health care that people will encounter. The chapters address the following key questions: What is the issue? What can I do/what can my practice do? How do my actions help patients, practice, and planet? Included throughout are case studies, vignettes, and anecdotes of previous successful interventions, while a checklist of the most impactful actions for others to follow, as supported by the current evidence base, provides a convenient summary. References and additional resource recommendations give directions for further guidance. The book looks at the four pillars of primary care – dentistry, General Practice, optometry, and pharmacy – and includes international contributions. Providing invaluable direction to turn good intentions into meaningful action, this book will be invaluable to health professionals and practice managers across all primary care disciplines and to students preparing to enter practice in those fields. It will also be of interest to integrated care system administrators and to health policymakers.