REDUCING PHARMACEUTICAL RESIDUES: NHS HIGHLAND LEADS THE WAY
Pharmaceuticals play a key role in modern medicine, but they can also pose an environmental risk as pharmaceutical residues can enter the environment across their life cycle, causing adverse effects on environmental health.
the lead in mitigating pharmaceutical emissions to aquatic ecosystems and reducing the impact of healthcare on the environment.
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The Alliance for Water Stewardship (AWS) is a global collaboration comprising business, the public sector and NGOs. Its members contribute to the sustainability of local water resources through their adoption and promotion of a universal framework for the sustainable use of water.
In 2019, Caithness General Hospital in NHS Highland (NHSH) became the first hospital in the world, and still the only one, to achieve Alliance for Water Stewardship (AWS) Certification.
Caithness General Hospital provides health care to the local town, Wick and the surrounding district. It is situated in the north of the Highland region of Scotland which covers 41 per cent of the land mass of Scotland and, as such, is the largest geographical Health Board in Scotland.
Context The presence of pharmaceutical residues in water is recognised internationally as an important public health and environmental issue. The quality of the used water discharged from Caithness General into the sewerage system, and from there into the environment.
As a natural function of their public health mission, hospitals are major users of medicines. As such they are key point sources for pharmaceuticals that go into the public water supply through consumption/use of medicines. Patients consume ‘active pharmaceutical ingredients’ (APIs) and excrete them in urine into the sewerage system. It’s estimated that between 30 and 100 per cent of an oral dose is excreted into the waste water system. For humans in particular, the discharge of antibiotics to water bodies exacerbates the problem of antimicrobial resistance which the World Health Organization has noted is an increasingly serious threat to global public health.
The project In 2015, representatives of NHS Highland, Highland and Islands Enterprise (HIE) and the
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scottishpharmacist.com
t’s estimated that 20 per cent of medicines are distributed in hospitals and so these institutions have a social responsibility to take
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