Caring for those we help also means caring for the environment they live in. This policy sets out how we are continuously working to decrease our environmental impact, including through travel, energy, procurement and recycling.
As a charity with community at its heart, we're committed to providing a better end of life experience for all. In everything that we do, we want to be conscious of the world we leave behind for our loved ones. We want to keep making a positive impact for the people we care for and keep our negative impact on the environment as low as possible.
That's why we're prioritising becoming a greener charity and making sure we're future fit by implementing our Environmental and Sustainability Strategy.
Climate change significantly impacts healthcare and the demand on its services. With more extreme weather, such as heatwaves, flooding or periods of severe cold, and environment-related illness, such as disease, pandemics and poor air quality happening now, healthcare services must adapt to ensure we can continue to help those in need.
Here are three key steps we're taking to ensure we continue to reduce our carbon footprint and help protect our planet for future generations.
What we’ve achieved so far
Although we have a lot of work to do, we've made great strides in reducing our CO2 emissions annually since 2019 for gas, electricity, fleet and business travel. This has been achieved by:
- making environmental sustainability one of our strategic objectives
- appointing a Sustainability Manager, responsible for reporting and reducing our carbon emissions
- creating an Environment & Sustainability Steering Group with senior members of staff from across the organisation to embed sustainability across all operations
- updating our Environment & Sustainability Policy with greater ambitions
- capturing our energy, travel and water data internally so we can identify areas of concern and set targets, and engage staff to switch off
- completing mandatory carbon reporting such as SECR and ESOS since 2019
- strengthening our Ethical Investment Policy in relation to limitations for investments in fossil fuels
- assessing our suppliers' commitment to the environment during our contract tendering process
- moving to an 'activity-based' working model where staff hot desk and hybrid work from home, reducing commuting and non-essential business travel
- moving to a 'place-based' model where nursing staff in the community have a smaller patch and travel smaller distances
- adding electric and hybrid vehicles to our company cars and removing all diesel options
- transitioning to electric vehicles for our nurse community vehicles
- reducing our office space and moving our London office to a BREEAM excellent building
- securing a REGO certified Green Tariff for electricity
- phasing out halogen and fluorescent strip lighting in our hospices and swapping to LED bulbs
- recycling paper and plastic at the vast majority of our estate and auditing our waste segregation to see how we can improve it
- reducing our printed literature, using FSC certified printers and paper, and printing less in the office
- reducing the number of mailouts we send annually, moving to digital communications where possible and removing the plastic outers on envelopes.
