Episode 080 | March 18, 2024 | 22:33
Guest: Clare Brook (Boston Scientific EMEA)
Published: March 18, 2024
Duration: 22:33
Description
Join Joachim and Clare, the sustainability lead for Boston Scientific’s EMEA business, as she discusses the challenges and demands of sustainability in the healthcare industry. Discover how businesses can meet customer demands for sustainability information, develop commercial teams, and collaborate with healthcare systems.
Full transcript
About this transcript
This transcript was automatically generated and may contain inaccuracies, typos, or mistranslations. Episodes recorded before 2024 were transcribed by an on-site model and may have a higher error rate. The content reflects the original conversation to the best of our ability. For the authoritative version, please listen to the audio episode.
Joachim Almdal: Hello Clare, welcome back on the Sustainable Healthcare Podcast. Today we are going to take a how-to approach, because there are a lot of people out there who are in similar issues as you are, and are starting to organize teams around sustainability, deal with customer demands, and figure out where to start.
Clare Brook: Hi. I am Clare. I work for Boston Scientific, a global medical device company, and I am the sustainability lead for our Europe, Middle East, and Africa business.
Joachim: You have a helicopter perspective from your EMEA sustainability lead role with a very commercial focus, because you have a commercial background yourself. One of your core tasks is to develop the commercial teams or coach them to respond to the new sustainability demands from clients. What customer demands are you seeing around sustainability?
Clare: We are seeing a lot of demands from customers. The knowledge is starting to grow and awareness is growing. Many of our customers and the healthcare system as a whole have been targeted with decarbonization, optimizing and reducing resources. They are asking a lot of questions, sometimes without necessarily having a joined-up approach. We may be asked one thing by one person, one thing by another group. We are increasingly being asked for a lot of detailed information with lots of variability.
One of the biggest challenges we face is having a clearer plan, a more collaborative vision and journey. In one place there is a focus on life cycle — we need to know the carbon footprint of every product. That is a really big, complex, difficult thing to do. Devices were not historically designed with sustainability in mind. We have a key focus on safety and efficacy, patient outcomes have led the way we developed product. Now we need to start thinking about sustainability, but we have incredibly long supply chains and incredibly complex materials. Some of the more sustainable materials might not be suitable. Other asks around packaging — increasing recycled content, recyclability, reuse of products at end of life, chemistry of products. So many questions coming at us from all these different places.
Joachim: Are you seeing this translate into tenders?
Clare: Absolutely. The tenders teams are being overwhelmed with requests. The volume of sustainability requests they have been receiving — we estimate a threefold increase over the last year. The weighting of sustainability within tenders has significantly increased. MedTech Europe commissioned work that looked at the trend of questions and the leading countries. The Nordic region is front and center. Norway is a great example with 30% weighting offered for sustainability in tenders. There is a lack of clarity at this stage which provides uncertainty and a challenge for medical device companies to know exactly what they will be looking for. We may get different asks from within the Nordic region — Sweden, Denmark.
The NHS where you have a roadmap is so helpful for companies because it allows us to plan. Our product life cycles are incredibly long. From conception to market release and approvals, we can be looking at a decade. A lot of these changes are not going to be quick for medical device companies to implement.
Joachim: How are your teams working with the commercial teams, and how would you recommend others work with them?
Clare: Firstly, listen and try to really learn and understand where our commercial teams are on the journey. They are often in very different places. There are groups at the front end getting a lot of questions and feeling overwhelmed. And then there are areas of the business not feeling the impact yet, thinking this doesn’t really apply to us. Coming from my commercial background, I know there are so many other things being prioritized.
There is a lot of work to do to show the organization the risk, but also identify the opportunity — risk alone is not what drives things forward. How does this bring value? My key objective is to have everyone have a degree of competency. Not everyone needs to be a subject matter expert. It really is about being confident enough to go out and have the conversation. Don’t let perfection be the enemy of good. None of us know everything. This is a constant learning journey, and the healthcare people and procurement are very much on a learning journey as well.
Joachim: Where does it make sense to get external help, and where is it paramount that it is done internally?
Clare: The skill sets are not yet embedded in many businesses, so it makes absolute sense to partner with people who have the knowledge and experience — that is where we have benefited from working with you guys. Having a sounding board to bounce off ideas. When you are starting out you don’t necessarily have a sustainability strategy. Having an external perspective and learning from what others in industry have been doing — that is where consultant support can be really valuable. Things like CSRD reporting are a massive lift across an organization, and you don’t want that taking away from focus on innovation.
Then I fundamentally believe you have to embed and take ownership within the organization. For example, education — bringing in and using the resources you have. We have been running workshops locally for some of our countries, looking at how we embed sustainability into business as usual across functions. Sustainability is probably the space more than any other where collaboration is absolutely vital.
Joachim: Don’t do it to people, do it with them. The end goal should be to build up the internal capabilities. The least preferable option is to have someone come in and solve it for you — if you pull them back out there is not much left in terms of capability.
Clare: Do your homework as with everything. Talk to the consultancy, make sure what they offer fits your needs. Have your objectives articulated. Make sure the company has the skill sets and that you can have that relationship. There is a lot of trust needed — you are sharing vulnerabilities in your business and structure. And you have to be willing to take the advice. Sometimes you get a consultant in and it’s a tick box exercise — you don’t take the advice and implement it. That’s the fundamental thing: now we need to do the job and actually implement.
Joachim: Socializing the results throughout is incredibly important. The people who are going to use the results need to be co-collaborators. When you remove the consultants — which eventually you will always have to — they feel like it was their tool or their analysis.
Clare: Absolutely right. Goes back to ownership and accountability. Socializing results is absolutely fundamental because that is the value. When defining outputs, they have to be meaningful for the business. Everything you are doing is going to bring about change. To bring that change, you have to show results that validate the actions that come next and take everyone on the journey.
Joachim: Any final advice?
Clare: Collaborate, co-create. When you are defining your strategy, socialize it. A lot of the challenge for sustainability people sitting within an organization is we are seen to have a vested interest. By partnering with the commercial organization, hearing them, making sure their voice is heard and accounted for, then it becomes a collaborative exercise that sustainability is part of and a key partner in. You have got to be a partner to your business.
Joachim: If you are leading sustainability change, more often than not you want to be the one asking questions rather than coming with answers. Flip it around and ask “what would you do if this was a quality question? Why is this important to you? Do you stand to lose business on this? Are we better or worse than our competitors?” Thank you so much for coming on the podcast Clare. Keep doing your wonderful work with the Boston team.
Clare: Thank you. It’s been an absolute pleasure.