Environmental sustainability in general practice
Last revised: 28 Oct 2024
By taking action to minimise the environmental footprint they generate, general practices can actively contribute to preserving our environment and planetary health, helping to manage the current and future adverse health effects of climate change – and reducing practice overheads. The RACGP’s Environmental sustainability in general practice resource will support Australian GPs and their practice teams to reduce their environmental footprint. The resource can be used by practices in all corners of Australia to become a more environmentally sustainable practice as well as identify, reduce and manage the adverse health effects of climate change. This includes actions on reducing energy consumption, prescribing decisions and advocating on behalf of patients for effective climate change policy and action. It provides information on:
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The RACGP has also developed an e-waste policy template to help practices articulate how they manage e-waste.
Managing e-waste
Audio Transcript.
Amandeep: So we do throw out a lot of e-waste. Unfortunately, we're replacing things at such a rapid pace - I think we've got 200,000 tons of e-waste every year that we're throwing out. So e-waste is any of our electronic devices. It's laptops, computers, faxes, televisions, smartphones, tablets, all of that that carries information on it that we throw out, is considered e-waste. So we need to be careful about how we dispose of these devices because they do contain patient information and we have obligations around privacy and confidentiality to make sure that we're not throwing out patient information, and it might fall into the wrong hands.
So there's one side of it around making sure that we're not inadvertently exposing our patient information to other parties, but there's also another part around the environmental concerns of throwing out some of these devices. They can be toxic to the environment because they release chemicals which are damaging and we need to make sure that we're not throwing it out with a general rubbish. So there are specific places where you can dispose of e-waste and there's resources on the RACGP website, which will go through - depending on what you're throwing out - some of those processes, some of those locations where you can actually go, or organizations you can contact to help you get rid of unwanted items.
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