St John of God Health Care was founded more than a century ago to care for people stricken by typhoid in the chaos of the 1890s gold rush.
Today, the catholic healthcare provider offers private hospital, pathology, home nursing and outreach services to over 200,000 people a year in Australia, New Zealand and the Asia-Pacific region. Its Australian operations include 13 private hospitals and it is now the nation’s fourth largest provider of pathology services.
The company’s mission includes commitments to demonstrate “ecological concern and respect for the earth,” and “environmental stewardship with the aim of reducing the environmental impact of our everyday activities.”
As evidence of that commitment, St John of God Health Care has invested $3.4m in more than 40 projects over the past three years to reduce the environmental impacts of its operations.
Its Environmental Capital Expenditure Fund is supporting lighting retrofits, use of renewable power generation, water and energy audits, organic waste composting, staff environmental training programs, and water efficiency initiatives, such as the installation of efficient shower heads, waterless urinals, and water reuse schemes.
St John of God Hospital in Ballarat, Victoria, has reduced its water use by 14 per cent over the past four years through measures such as installing flow controllers in showers, rainwater harvesting, and recycling water from instrument sterilisers for use in water boilers, cooling towers and toilets.
Reducing its water use by 10 megalitres – the equivalent of four Olympic-sized swimming pools – demonstrates the hospital’s local leadership in the context of sustained drought in Victoria’s central highlands. Its efforts in water conservation, waste recycling and environmental management have also earned recognition from the Australian Council of Healthcare Standards and the Ballarat Business Excellence Awards.
In Western Australia, the installation of solar panels at St John of God Hospital, Murdoch will save the 357-bed facility 3,740 GJ of energy in annual gas usage, and the equivalent of 230 tonnes of CO2 emissions.
The 250m2 solar array has replaced a gas-fired hot water heating system to supply 40,000 litres of hot water to the hospital.
The solar hot water heating system will pay for itself within seven years and lessons from its use will be shared with other facilities in St John of God Health Care’s portfolio.
St John of God’s Pinelodge Clinic in the Melbourne suburb of Dandenong has cut its waste by one-third and adopted a composting program that has averted 300,000 litres of food waste from going to landfill.
“Composting is a great way to help our environment and anyone can do it in the workplace or their own backyard,” says Pinelodge Clinic’s Sustainability Adviser, Melissa Carstens. “Australia has thin nutrient poor topsoil and composting addresses both these issues.”
St John of God Health Care’s head office recently adopted CarbonSystems’ Enterprise Sustainability Platform – a web based technology that is helping the health provider track and report its environmental performance to government, staff and customers.
Group Environmental Engineer, Dean Farnsworth, says capturing critical data such as electricity, gas, fuel, water and waste would be a massive burden on the organisation if the company had continued using a manual data system. “We were recording data manually for internal benchmarking but quickly realised that this approach wouldn’t permit us to fulfill our obligations under the federal government’s National Greenhouse and Energy Reporting legislation.
“We have more than 230 sites across the country so manually capturing and collating all the necessary data would have taken too many man hours,” says Farnsworth.
“Further, since we are reporting to government about our energy use and greenhouse gas emissions, we have to ensure that our reports are complete and accurate.”
“There is no way that we could have guaranteed that level of data integrity if we had continued to use a manual paper system and in-house spreadsheets.”
“The CarbonSystems platform is incredibly easy to use,” says Farnsworth. “We have trained around 20 staff to enter data and generate business reports for internal benchmarking and reporting against our key performance indicators.”
Mr Farnsworth says having web-based access to one data repository has revolutionised environmental data tracking and simplified reporting.
“ESP provides clear visibility of our environmental footprint and the ability to generate tailored business reports whenever we want them.
“It is helping us verify the return on investment of our environmental programs while helping St John of God Health Care to transition to the low carbon economy.”
More information
St John of God Healthcare - Rebecca Steffen +61 411 144 870
CarbonSystems - Dan Gaffney +61 411 15 60 15
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We view CarbonSystems as a key part of our effort to achieve Microsoft’s business and environmental sustainability goals. Microsoft Chief Environmental Strategist, Rob Bernard.
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