Episode 065 | July 17, 2023 | 34:02
Guest: Elisa Frenz
Published: July 17, 2023
Duration: 34:02
Description
Frederik van Deurs and Elisa Frenz, CEO of Health Pro Europe, discuss the importance of sustainable procurement in healthcare. Learn about the challenges and opportunities in driving green transformation, and the role of procurement professionals in shaping demands for the market.
Full transcript
About this transcript
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The short-term financial aspects are misleading us. There might be an investment required right now to reshape our healthcare systems towards more sustainable actions — that is a long-term investment we are taking. The short-term financial aspect is out of date but still exists. How do we make sustainable strategy part of C-level commitment to enable the other leaders within a hospital to take action?
Hello and welcome to the Sustainable Healthcare Podcast. I have the honor of talking to Elisa Frenz, CEO of HealthPro Europe — an NGO whose mission is bringing together procurement professionals from healthcare and hospitals across Europe to deliver more efficient and greener procurement.
We see a tremendous gap in knowledge sharing and upskilling among healthcare procurement professionals. We want to leverage the power of purchasing from the hospital side. Healthcare procurement is not such a traditional role compared to other industries — there is opportunity to do a lot. We started in 2019 as a UK-based NGO, just before the pandemic. The pandemic made the challenges even more visible. Four years later we have built quite a successful ecosystem — started as a key-opinion-leader network, now a digitalized space offering collaboration opportunities, connections into industry, and procurement peer connections across Europe and Canada.
Public procurement is a main driver for the economy in Europe. Procurement departments drive the financial decisions in hospitals — giving them a green mandate is powerful. The NHS in the UK is the frontier — they have declared that by April 1, 2027 they will not have a single supplier not aligned with Science-Based Targets and will not buy anything without an LCA. That puts huge pressure on suppliers across the value chain to become Paris-aligned.
The rest of Europe is quite far behind. There are good examples on energy efficiency, waste management and food, but the challenge is Scope 3 and the doubt about which framework to apply — this paralyzes action. With the global economy being hard, sustainability is losing some traction because hospitals face high economic burdens. We need to talk about incentives and about partnerships with industry — it does not work on one side alone.
The dichotomy that sustainability comes at a cost — is it being broken down? Yes, it is very broken down. These podcasts are important to show it works. Short-term financial aspects are misleading us. We need long-term investments in reshaping healthcare systems. How do we make sustainable strategy part of C-level commitment?
We see action anxiety where the mandate is not strikingly clear — innovative or sustainable work tends to fall between two chairs because it does not fit traditional systems thinking. Recently HealthPro Europe hosted the first pan-European hospital and healthcare procurement summit in Brussels. Success factors: post-pandemic hunger for meeting, and the goal of breaking down country hurdles to act more European. We now have a digital platform and ecosystem. The beautiful outcome: foster networks and collaborations within different regions while we as the European Association build the interconnections.
The picture across Europe on sustainability requirements is fragmented — early movers (Danish regions, NHS) are well progressed, the laggards are very far behind, and requirements are not streamlined. In Switzerland there are 661 sustainability indicators reviewing public tenders — so many it becomes obsolete. NHS is onto something by saying SBTi is the gold standard.
Country examples:
Netherlands — strong focus on empowering through group purchasing organizations, driving sustainability particularly via circularity. Products are brought into a second life cycle through collaboration of GPOs and hospitals. Frontrunner in collaboration thinking.
Spain (community of Madrid) — strong on value-based healthcare. Procurement repositioned from a public/regional authority standpoint to transform the entire organization to be more integrated, asking “what is the value here for the patient” and bringing that back into product purchasing.
Portugal — tremendous power in centralized procurement. Electronic systems make data available across all public hospitals, creating transparency for better decisions.
Compared to these, many other countries are disconnected, treating procurement functions with little care. Procurement should be in the boardroom for strategic decisions.
Three key challenges for green hospital procurement:
1. We need a common language and framework — what we mean by green procurement and sustainability needs to be defined.
2. The need to collaborate is getting more explicit but faces obstacles — change of mindset is required.
3. We need to think about healthcare systems differently. Right now we treat the sick. If we want to be more sustainable, health is the foundational pillar and hospitals need to be reframed and incentivized so patients are actually not coming into the hospitals — well-being upfront vs. treating sick people. A transition from a sick-care regime to a preventive healthcare regime.
Thank you Elisa for being on the show. Thanks to all our listeners — please share and subscribe.