Net zero to heroes – how SMEs can drive public health’s green revolution

Lucy Symons-Jones, director of sustainability at ETL, talks to Andrew Mernin about the role of health tech firms in decarbonising public health, while bolstering their own competitiveness.

While health tech firms are embroiled in their own race to net zero, many are also playing a pivotal role in the decarbonisation of public health.

Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) selling into the NHS or global equivalents, are helping to drive fresh innovation on sustainability, while also contributing to better patient outcomes.

Working at the intersection of SMEs and public health is Lucy Symons-Jones, director of sustainability at ETL, a specialist consultancy which transforms health and life sciences environments.

With public health demand for net zero-focused innovators outstripping supply, Lucy sees vast untapped potential for SMEs.

“The SMEs we work with that have gone net zero are overwhelmed with opportunity from public health,” she says. “Big public sector organisations are desperately calling for innovation around this.”

All SMEs must meet the legal requirement of net zero emissions by 2050. This means getting to grips with their emissions sources and impact now, to measure reduction progress going forward.

In governance terms, they must ensure everyone from the boardroom throughout understands the gap to goal; and also consider the tools, resources and management to progress the decarbonisation journey.

Those health tech firms able to crack their in-house net zero challenge will enhance their appeal to public health bodies looking for sustainability throughout their supply chain, says Lucy.

Even more appealing, however, are the innovators with direct, cleaner solutions to public health processes and procedures.

“For an SME it’s wonderful when you can sell into the public sector at scale, because the numbers you can achieve are extraordinary. If you sell into one NHS trust, it really can become many.

“I hope SMEs are keen to contribute to the health service and the greener NHS campaign because there is so much need. Many of the SMEs that engage with the public sector are just overwhelmed with opportunities at the moment as there isn’t a big enough pool of them, so we’re looking to make that bigger.”

The NHS has adopted a multi-year plan to become the world’s first net zero carbon national health system by 2040, in terms of the emissions it directly controls – and by 2045 for the emissions it influences. Meanwhile, social value and sustainability credentials will become mandatory within procurement evaluations and ratings from April 2022.

Lucy says: “Increasingly trusts will only work with SMEs that are net zero. One tenth of the procurement decision currently is based on the material performance and social value that you offer as a business. This is only going to become more and more significant and eventually not being net zero will become an exclusion in terms of working with NHS trusts. At the moment this is a carrot, but at some point, it will become a stick.”

Lucy joined ETL in September 2021, ahead of the launch of its new SME sustainability offering in November, corresponding with the COP26 conference.

She is well versed in the challenges of entrepreneurialism and building SMEs, having founded an off-grid solar energy business in her native Australia in 2012. As a long-time champion of decarbonisation and renewable energy, she has also witnessed at close hand a dramatic shift in attitudes towards sustainability in recent years.

“It’s amazing now because back then we were just one small business working on something that was perhaps a bit niche and sustainability was a bit nerdy. We were just the energy people. Now I can talk to my mum about solar power, and she totally gets it. The pace of change in technology is astounding. Everybody is interested and involved and that just means that the opportunity for innovation is on fire.”

This shift has largely been driven by the global awakening to the climate change crisis, Lucy says.

“People now see the impacts of climate change every day, whether it’s parents taking kids to school and seeing cars idling and giving off fumes, or a gardener realising that the lawn is growing three quarters of the way into winter. We just didn’t used to see this in the past. I think people are really seeing the effects of climate change.”

Further change is needed, however, to fully engage the world in the global challenge of decarbonisation, Lucy believes.

“In energy and decarbonisation, we’re still a bunch of nerds who talk in jargon and act in a way that is too technical. We need to be able to make the link between decarbonisation and things that have social value for people, like air pollution improvements, changes in the levels of toxic chemicals in water or health benefits.

“It’s amazing that the public is now engaged but we can’t just give them technical drawings and expect them to be interested. We need to be able to talk in a way that makes sense to people. I think perhaps we are a bit too engineering focused, when this is something that should be technology-led.”

The opportunities awaiting health tech firms able to decarbonise are vast; but many potential barriers await on the road to net zero.

“Resource is probably the biggest barrier,” says Lucy. “When I had my SME, I was laser focused on client meetings, implementation, accounts and the general day-to-day operations. But if you had asked me then, in 2012, what our carbon impact was I wouldn’t have had an answer. I think for many SMEs cost is a factor, but resource is perhaps a bigger one.”

Whether a health tech SME or an NHS trust, fundamental changes to operations and the way business is done might also be required to fully embrace the net zero challenge.

“If you look at the big calculations of the cost of the net zero transition, it is possible to contemplate the economics in terms of finding the mix of public and private money. The real thing is behavioural change – being open to doing things in a different way.

“But SMEs do this every day. They are so adaptable and have so much to teach the public sector about innovation and being nimble. The public sector will learn from this because the climate crisis requires it. None of the tropes of the public sector, like being slow to make decisions, bureaucratic and opaque, can apply in the face of the climate crisis.”

For SMEs to lead the way in this behavioural shift, they may first need to overcome the intimidation factor.

“Many SMEs may be intimidated. The public sector speaks its own language, net zero has its own language and I think it’s intimidating for a lot of small businesses. It’s too easy to put it in the ‘too hard’ basket but that’s not a savvy commercial decision.”

ETL’s role, says Lucy, is partly to break down these barriers – between public and private, large and small, and net zero experts and novices.

This task is eased by an increasingly collaborative healthcare landscape, with one of the few positives to emerge from the pandemic being more cross-border, cross-discipline working for the greater good.

“The interface between the public sector and SMEs at the moment is going really well. We are receiving a lot of requests from the public sector for green planning and climate adaption plans. We can connect SMEs with hospitals that are keen to make such innovations.”

Lucy cites one particularly exciting example of potential SME/hospital relations – a start-up which aims to use clean energy drones to ship COVID swabs from hospitals to test sites.

“The NHS is struggling to clear backlogs and every single patient coming in for a procedure has to be swabbed. If you can’t process the swabs in time, the backlog is only going to get worse. This could dramatically speed things up, and a grant application is currently pending.”

Often these relationships are born out of on-the-ground knowledge of the specific needs of a trust or healthcare authority. Lucy adds that public health bodies are often far more innovative and open to revolutionary changes than deep-rooted stereotypes suggest.

“It’s about talking to the right person, not necessarily having an organigram of every hospital and every person with the right job description. It’s about genuinely knowing that ‘Bob’ at ‘X’ hospital is really open to these ideas or that this site has a particular challenge. Our role is to connect SMEs with these public sector opportunities.

“We understand that we can’t just be energy nerds focused on the widget or product side. What we can do is make introductions to teams who understand the intricacies of how projects are managed, how programmes are managed and how change happens within healthcare and life sciences.”

Read more on how ETL can help health tech firms sell into the NHS by being more sustainable.