What will it take to reduce waste in healthcare? These and related pressing questions were addressed recently by a series of speakers at the National Medicines Symposium, hosted by the Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care.
As part of Croakey Conference News Service coverage of #NMS23, our rotated X/Twitter account @WePublicHealth re-tweeted some of the key points from the discussions, as summarised below.
(Check this link to see other Croakey articles from the symposium).
Opening
Yvonne Weldon, an independent councillor for the City of Sydney and a proud Wiradjuri woman, provided a Welcome to Country for the online participants.
Ways forward
Senator Malarndirri McCarthy
Raising questions
Professor Anne Duggan, CEO of ACSQHC 
Timeline
Professor Paul Kelly, Chief Medical Officer, Department of Health and Aged Care
In a reminder of the tragic delays between evidence emerging about the imperatives for climate health action, and actual policy action….
More questions to ask
Professor Nick Watts, Director, Centre for Sustainable Medicine, National University of Singapore
Previously Watts worked as the Chief Sustainability Officer for the NHS in the UK, where he spearheaded their efforts to efforts to deliver low-carbon healthcare, leading the Greener NHS team with a budget of almost S$1 billion. He is a medical doctor, a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians’ Faculty of Public Health, and has worked as the Executive Director of the Lancet Countdown, and as the founder of the Global Climate and Health Alliance and the UK Health Alliance on Climate Change.
Tackling waste
Dr Elizabeth Deveny, Chief Executive Officer, Consumer Health Forum
Evidence matters
Professor Paul Glasziou, Professor of Evidence-Based Medicine, Bond University
Medicine stewardship
Associate Professor Liz Marles, Clinical Director, Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care and General Practitioner, Hornsby-Brooklyn GP Unit
Social prescribing and deprescribing
Dr Kate Charlesworth, Medical Director, Climate Risk and Net Zero Unit, NSW Ministry of Health
Charlesworth is a public health physician in Sydney and leads the Climate Risk & Net Zero Unit at NSW Health.
Panel discussion: appropriate prescribing
Global focus
Dr Alpana Mair, Head of Effective Prescribing and Therapeutics, Scottish Government and Senior Consultant, World Health Organization
Knowledge gaps
Dr Forbes McGain, Anaesthetist and ICU physician at Western Health, Melbourne and Associate Dean, Sustainable Healthcare, University of Melbourne
Respiratory diseases
Dr Val Stoynova, general internist in community and tertiary care in Victoria, Canada and Clinical Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia
Dr Celia Culley, clinical pharmacist and pharmacy clinical coordinator in Victoria, Canada and Clinical Instructor for the University of British Columbia
Panel discussion: actions needed
Grace Wong, Pharmacists for the Environment Australia and Dr Eugenie Kayak, Doctors for the Environment Australia
What changes can you make?
Darlene Cox, Executive Director, Health Care Consumers’ Association
Digital solutions
Dr Paul Miles, Director eHealth and Medication Safety, ACSQHC
Workforce matters
Professor Faye McMillan AM, Community Pharmacist, Deputy National Rural Health Commissioner, Professor in Indigenous Health, University Technology Sydney
McMillan is a Wiradjuri yinaa (woman) from Trangie, NSW, and currently one of two Deputy National Rural Health Commissioners. She is a Professor in Indigenous Health in the UTS School of Public Health, as well as a board member of The Australian Pharmacy Council (APC) and is also the chair of the APC Indigenous health strategy group.
Panel discussion: scaling up
Toni Riley, Pharmacist – RUM Project
Dr Emma-Leigh Synnott, Medical Advisor, Sustainable Development Unit, Western Australia Department of Health
Professor Branwen Morgan, Minimising Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) Mission Lead at CSIRO
Croakey acknowledges and thanks Laura Hemming for live-tweeting the symposium from @CroakeyNews.
To stay in touch with National Medicines Symposium presenters, follow this X/Twitter list 
