HydroNation Scholarship - Prescribing for a Blue-Green Environment

The proposed project closes the loop between human and environmental health by testing the hypothesis that blue green prescribing strategies offer an acceptable way to deliver positive health outcomes as part of a strategy to reduce our reliance on pharmaceuticals and thus their negative impact on the water environment.

The project will highlight the impact of the environment on our health, support the use of Scotland’s green and blue infrastructure for human health and help develop the concept of the natural health service, whilst leading to greater community engagement. At the same time, it will raise awareness of the critical role that human interaction has on our water environment and how people can mitigate against further environmental harm and examine NHS and public awareness of the negative health impacts associated with the water environment. The approach could positively influence practice of public bodies to ensure that pharmaceutical pollution of water is minimised. It will further the work of the Green Breakthrough Partnership, which is currently developing a ‘green formulary’ aiming to reduce risk from pharmaceuticals to the environment by guiding prescribers towards the least ecotoxic medicine without compromising therapeutic outcomes. This highly innovative and timely project aims to integrate blue-green prescribing into such a ‘green formulary’ and into prescribing guidelines to address the acceptability of the ‘green formulary’ – and blue-green prescribing as an integrated intervention – for patients, prescribers and NHS decision makers, which is crucial to the longer term vision of the GBP to enhance water quality and reduce environmental impact of healthcare.