Case Studies

Australia’s largest private health provider Ramsay Health Care employs 30,000 staff and runs 116 hospitals throughout Australia, Indonesia, the UK and France. In Australia alone it admits three-quarters of a million patients and performs half a million medical procedures annually.

The listed company’s portfolio of Australian hospitals and day procedure centres are diverse in size, age and geographic location. Its facilities are located in NSW, Victoria, Queensland, SA and WA, and it operates several types of facilites – large general hospitals, rural medical-surgical hospitals, psychiatric hospitals, rehabilitation and co-located hospitals.

That’s a lot of moving parts. And like any large and reputable organisation, Ramsay is conscious of its duty to protect the environment as part of its business and corporate social responsibilities.

In financial year 2010 the company’s Australian operations achieved small positive cuts in its CO2 emissions and energy use per patient day – one of two core metrics Ramsay uses to evaluate its financial and environmental progress. It reduced its energy use by 8 MJ to 420 MJ per patient day and cut its carbon footprint to 80.7 kg CO2 equivalent per patient day.

Ramsay is conscious of its duty to protect the environment as part of its business and corporate social responsibilities.

The company’s national environment manager Geoff Adams attributes these wins to a raft of ongoing reforms.

“We’re making small steps on several fronts,” says Adams, who prepares the company’s environmental reports for the company Board and its legislative reporting requirements.

“Initiatives such as lighting upgrades, smarter air-conditioning control systems, new green star energy efficient buildings, and staff behavioural change programs are helping us to run a greener, more cost efficient company. We tend to pilot these programs in our larger hospitals where scale and resources mean we can evaluate them rigorously.”

Ramsay Health shares successful programs through environment working parties, internal communication channels, and a company intranet that delivers e-learning packages for hospital managers.

Ramsay’s environmental performance and reporting are scrutinised by the Board’s Operational Risk Committee. “Senior management and the Board wholly support these programs because they understand that reducing unnecessary waste and minimising the use of scarce resources is consistent with financial sustainability, risks management, cost containment and meeting the expectations of our customers and shareholders,” says Adams.

In its latest report to the federal government’s Energy Efficiency Opportunities program, Ramsay has targeted air-conditioning, water and staff as three areas of focus for environmental programs over coming years.

Air conditioning is used 24 hours per day and represents the greatest concentrated demand for energy use at most of Ramsay’s hospitals and facilities.

Greenslopes Private Hospital close to Brisbane is the company’s biggest energy user, consuming 100,000 GJ of energy per annum. Ramsay has begun making significant energy use savings by consolidating and upgrading the hospital’s chillers and cooling towers, and recalibrating the algorithms that control air temperature, humidity and air pressure in operating theatres.

“CarbonSystems’ Enterprise Sustainability Platform gives me financial grade business reports about our environmental performance whenever I want them.”

Ramsay has found that staff “green” policy teams and staff education and training programs have also been effective for changing environmental behaviours its Westmead and St George Hospitals in Sydney. “However, we have tried to minimize a reliance on training and personal memory as ways to effect change,” says Adams. Several of Ramsay’s major hospitals are also saving water by recycling wastewater from sterilizers and water purification facilities for non-clinical uses such as energy exchange and water-cooling uses.

In 2010 Ramsay adopted a web based technology platform to help it track and report its environmental performance to government, shareholders and customers.

“We moved to a software solution because tracking and reporting with accuracy was becoming an expensive and increasingly onerous task,” says Adams, who will trained key personnel in finance, procurement and risk to use the Enterprise Sustainability Platform.

“Compliance reporting to government about the company’s energy and greenhouse gas emissions was a wake up that we needed a solution that was accurate and verifiable from an audit perspective.

“CarbonSystems’ Enterprise Sustainability Platform gives me financial grade business reports about our environmental performance whenever I want them,” says Adams. “This provides enormous peace of mind compared to the headaches we faced using the myriad systems we had inherited through organic growth and acquisition.

“At the push of a button I can generate reports on the fly that provide granular detail about energy use at a single site, at multiple sites or companywide level. That flexibility and ease of use means we have complete confidence in our environmental reporting and can focus on how to best invest in environmental programs and infrastructure that will help Ramsay make the transition to the low energy, low carbon economy.”

Media contact - Dan Gaffney 0411 156 015