The Sustainable Healthcare Coalition is proud to announce that it has joined the Sustainable Medicines Partnership, an important new initiative, led by YewMaker.
In its collaboration with the SMP, a not-for-profit private-public collaboration, the Sustainable Healthcare Coalition will join this multi-stakeholder effort to identify and bring forward a number of projects that harness cross-sector capabilities to generate science-based, scalable and high-impact solutions to improve the sustainability profile of medicines across their manufacture, distribution, use and disposal life cycles.
While the healthcare industry is responsible for saving millions of human lives, its work comes at a considerable cost to the environment; the healthcare sector is estimated to produce approximately 4.4% of global greenhouse gas emissions and has a vital role to play in mitigating against and treating the impact of the climate crisis.
This burden is compounded by inefficiencies in healthcare systems that lead to avoidable resource consumptions and to poor health outcomes. As an example, research suggests that at least 30–50% of prescribed medication is not taken as recommended, potentially resulting in increased patient morbidity or mortality, as well as to wasted expenditure and unnecessary environmental impact. Recognising that more must be done to drive the sustainable transition, members of the Sustainable Healthcare Coalition come together to accelerate the delivery of a net zero, sustainable health supply chain. One such area the Coalition is working on is how to reduce the carbon footprint of clinical trials. Through executing priority actions, the Sustainable Medicines Partnership aims to stop the avoidable waste of medicines and medicines packaging – reducing healthcare emissions and increasing health equity globally.
Dr Fiona Adshead, Chair of the Sustainable Healthcare Coalition commented, “The Sustainable Healthcare Coalition was created by NHS England to bring companies together in response to the evidence that pharmaceutical products and medical devices were accountable for much of the NHS’s carbon footprint. This new collaboration with the SMP is an important next step in our efforts to ensure medicines can be developed and used effectively and responsibly in a carbon-constrained world. By working together, the Sustainable Healthcare Coalition and SMP can bring awareness and drive innovation to make medicines more sustainable.”
Separately, Fiona Adshead is also joining the SMP Executive team as Senior Policy Lead.
Nazneen Rahman, YewMaker CEO and SMP Director said, “The Sustainable Healthcare Coalition were key to the development of many approaches used today to measure healthcare’s carbon footprint. Their knowledge and experience will be highly valuable in SMP’s work to better measure the environmental impacts of medicines and to translate these metrics to practical, incentivised solutions that ensure our use of medicines is responsible, equitable, and sustainable.”
YewMaker, which builds science-based, scalable, concepts and solutions that make healthcare more sustainable, is the initiator and executive lead of the SMP.
