In July, the Canadian Coalition for Green Health Care’s Marketing Analyst, Mikayla Robinson sat down with Bob Willard, one of the Coalition’s growing cadre of volunteer advisors, to learn more about sustainable procurement in Canada’s health services sector.
Bob is a leading expert on sustainability justifications, sustainability reporting frameworks, and sustainable procurement.
Prior to founding Sustainability Advantage, Bob had a 34-year award-winning career at IBM Canada. Although his work there was not directly related to sustainability, it prepared him for how to appeal to hard-nosed business leaders to pay more attention to their company’s impacts on people and the planet. That experience helps him engage the business community in proactively avoiding risks and capturing opportunities by using smart environmental, social, and governance (ESG) practices.
For the last few years, he has focused on sustainable procurement and net-zero procurement as market forces to incentivize the transition to more sustainable business models and to mobilize businesses in the race to net-zero greenhouse gases (GHGs).
Discover more about what inspires him, what the most significant change is that health care can undertake on its road to sustainability, and learn what he sees as barriers and opportunities in sustainable procurement.
Q 1: What inspires you to be involved in making health care more sustainable?
My claim to fame is the business case for any sector, any business, any organization, to operate in a more sustainable way. The early writing that I did on this was encouraging companies to take advantage of the so-called low hanging fruit associated with more sustainable operations; saving money on their energy, water, material and waste costs. And that would certainly apply to the health care sector. They use a lot of energy, water and materials, resulting in significant waste.
There are lots of opportunities in the health care sector to do more than they’re already doing. They can use their buying power as a market force to encourage their suppliers to use more sustainable business models, to improve their environmental and social impacts, and to produce more ethical, low-carbon, and durable products.
Q 2: What do you believe is the most significant change health care should undertake?
It really comes back to the leverage that health care organizations can exert on all supplier organizations using sustainable procurement, or a subset — “net-zero procurement”.
“Net-zero procurement” is making sure you get the best value for money (not necessarily the lowest price). by making sure that you’re acquiring the most low-carbon goods and services from suppliers that are most committed to science-based GHG reduction targets. If the purchaser cares about these things, they are much more interested in dealing with suppliers who also care about those things.
Q 3: What are the biggest barriers and facilitators to this change?
The first barrier is resistance to change. There are people who have been procuring on behalf of hospitals and clinics for years, developing processes they are comfortable with and likely created themselves. The last thing they want is for someone from the outside to suggest changes. Our challenge is to handle this change delicately. First, we need to reassure them that we are not implying their current methods are wrong or that we intend to discard their established procurement processes. Instead, we aim to build on their foundational procurement processes by incorporating sustainability attributes into the evaluation of goods and services.
The other big barrier is the traditional low-price focus of procurement professionals. We need to replace a best-price priority to a best-value priority. Best value is achieved when the customer acquires the best-quality products from the best-quality supplier, at an affordable price. Sustainable procurement includes desirable sustainability attributes of products and suppliers as contributors to their quality. A best-value procurement mandate is critical.
Health care facilities seek suppliers who are trustworthy, punctual, reliable, and align with the hospital’s concerns, including sustainability. Because of my concern about climate change, I am particularly focused on “net-zero procurement,” ensuring the best value from products and suppliers with the lowest carbon footprint. We can highlight greenhouse gas reductions and evaluate suppliers based on their commitment to reducing emissions. By emphasizing low-carbon attributes in bid appraisals and weighting them appropriately, we can draw attention to the importance of suppliers’ commitment to net-zero targets. This approach will foster a market for more low-carbon and circular products and encourage companies to adapt their business models for a better impact on people and the planet.
When I worked for IBM selling computer systems to governments and large companies, we would receive requests for proposals (RFPs) from those customers. The first thing we checked was how many points were assigned to each criterion. Naturally, we focused on the criteria with the highest points. This same principle can be applied to sustainability criteria in procurement, ensuring it gets the attention it deserves. Scoring products and their suppliers on their sustainability attributes, and then heavily weighting their scores in the bid appraisal process, incentivizes them to improve in those areas. If they earn more points than their competitors, they have a better chance of winning the business. It’s win-win-win for the supplier, the environment, and society.
Q 4: What opportunities do you see in this sector?
There is an exciting opportunity for the health care sector to embrace sustainable procurement. If you want to introduce sustainable procurement in your health care facility, I have a couple of free, open-source toolkits that can help: a Sustainable Procurement Toolkit (https://sustainabilityadvantage.com/sp/toolkit/) and a Net-Zero Procurement Toolkit (https://sustainabilityadvantage.com/sp/net-zero/). The toolkits contain samples of four things: sustainability-related product specifications; a questionnaire about the supplier’s sustainability-related performance and commitments; a bid appraisal template that weights the product and supplier sustainability scores heavily enough to matter; and terms and conditions to add to contracts with winning suppliers to ensure they follow through on their plans and commitments.
When introducing the toolkit, the next step is piloting it. Select a few suppliers—a cross-section of your current suppliers—and test the questionnaires with them. Evaluate their responses and assess the impact on your end in terms of the skills and resources needed for the required assessments, as well as any cost implications. If it seems unmanageable, you can choose not to proceed. But I expect you will be surprised by how easy it is to integrate sustainable procurement approaches into your current procurement systems with little or no disruption.
Some institutions, such as hospitals and clinics, use central buying groups like Supply Ontario for acquisitions. These groups seek volume discounts by purchasing on behalf of many schools or hospitals. It’s essential for these central buying groups to adopt sustainable procurement methodologies, driven by the health care sector’s demand for such practices.
The health care sector has significant leverage on the economy. The leadership in the sustainable procurement arena that’s being shown by the healthcare sector is fantastic.
– end of interview-
The Coalition encourages you to begin the sustainable procurement process in your health care organisation if you have not already done so.
To learn more about how you can get involved, visit: https://greenhealthcare.ca/sustainable-procurement/
