Seminar on Current Regulatory Actions Addressing Pharmaceuticals in the Environment was held on Nov 3, 2022 in Helsinki
A hybrid seminar on Current Regulatory Actions Addressing Pharmaceuticals in the Environment was hosted by the University of Helsinki on November 3, 2022. The seminar gathered together ca. 40 participants live in Helsinki and ca. 50 participants online from around the Nordic countries, representing different healthcare and environmental sectors. The seminar was organised in cooperation with:
· the Generation Green – a volunteer-based task force promoting the implementation of green principles and practices in educational programmes in pharmaceutical and medical sciences at the University of Helsinki (doi.org/10.1016/j.scp.2020.100262),
· the Finnish strategic research project, SUDDEN, short for Sustainable Drug Discovery and Development with End-of-Life Yield, that aims at reducing the environmental hazards related to the life cycle of pharmaceutical products as a collaborative effort of six different universities/research institutes (www.sudden.fi).
· and the NordicPOP university hub.
The speakers of the seminar included representatives of likewise national authorities (Ministry of Social Affairs and Health and Finnish Medicines Agency) and European commission (DG-Envi), European parliament, and European sectoral pharmaceutical organizations (GIRP, PGEU, EFPIA). In addition, the audience had the chance to learn about the Role of law in the transformation towards sustainability and the Opportunities for national actors to influence green transformation(s) in the pharmaceutical sector through lectures held by representatives of the legal research units of the University of Lapland and the University of Eastern Finland.
In the after-play of the hybrid seminar, a stakeholder club event arranged by the SUDDEN consortium, the Nordic community was concluded as a significant enabler for collaborative work toward sustainable pharmacy in its broadest sense.