Sustainability Handbook: An Approach to Design and Operation

Sustainability as a topic is extremely broad and, in some areas contentious. Even more so when it is applied to the diverse and complex, yet product focused, pharmaceutical industry. The increasing recognition and understanding of the need for patient focused healthcare, combined with issues around drug shortages, pushes the industry towards the client (patient) expectation of globally caring yet efficient drug development and manufacturing programs.

In December, to support this, ISPE published its Sustainability Handbook with guidance in each key topic area. It is about definition, go-to advice and the adoption of a set of principled examples rather than the provision of definitive criteria or instructions, to help the reader develop a deeper understanding. To ensure a global approach, the United Nations stance on sustainability has been adopted. This is accepting of climate change, finite resource reduction and a view that it is better that something rather than nothing is done. This consequently implies that we, given that knowledge at the front end of healthcare, owe it to our patients to be responsible and caring of the environment we live in.

Throughout the Sustainability Handbook we have aimed to give guidance on alternative, and precautionary, methods of considering the use of natural resources and, where not possible, best using those resources that we have available to us to the benefit of both us as individuals, our patients and the bottom line. The guide does not claim to be definitive and is designed to be improved and updated as new information, methods and technologies present themselves.

Who is it for? It is aimed at a broad spectrum of users from Board Members to Operations/Facility Managers; from Project Managers through Design Engineers and Architects to site-based Equipment Engineers as a flick through, pause and find tool in the resolution of a better way. Get your copy of the Sustainability Handbook today!