Background: Health care work contributes significantly to greenhouse gas emissions. Primary health care is community-based and focused on wellness and disease prevention. Within primary health care, pharmacists are most frequently the stewards of medicines, supplies, and other tangible products that contribute to carbon footprints. Pharmacists are in a unique position to help adapt to and mitigate climate change-related issues. Objective: To examine pharmacists’ perspectives on climate adaptation and mitigation strategies in primary health care delivery in interprofessional settings. Methods: Semi-structured qualitative interviews with primary care pharmacists were undertaken. Constant-comparative data analysis was used to code and categorize findings. The COREQ system was applied to ensure rigor and quality of research. Results: A total of 21 primary care pharmacists participated in this research. Several core themes emerged as follows: (a) universal agreement that climate change is real and primary health care needs to evolve rapidly to address it; (b) recognition that primary health care is time-pressured and resource constrained so successful solutions need to be pragmatic and work within realities of practice; (c) identification of actionable priorities with high potential for mitigation impact; and (d) mobilization of a coalition to develop system-wide initiatives that could be implemented in primary health care. Conclusions: Collaborative approaches and those that focus on the implementation of regulatory requirements were identified as being most productive in this setting.
Austin et al. (Fri,) studied this question.