Embedding sustainability objectives into Surrey Physio has required a combination of top-down leadership, cultural change, strategic integration, and continual evaluation.

Here are the steps we took:

Leadership Commitment:

• Senior management and leadership teams at Surrey Physio championed and visibly supported sustainability efforts.
• We appointed a Chief Sustainability Officer to oversee the work we are doing.

Stakeholder Engagement:

• We engaged employees, customers, suppliers, and the community in sustainability conversations to understand their expectations and insights.
• Our team were involved in the process, not only asking them what we could do better, but asking them about their own personal green initiatives.

Develop a Clear Vision and Strategy:

• We sat down with our board to create a clear vision and strategy around carbon literacy, healthcare inequalities, reducing carbon footprint, and becoming more sustainable as an organisation both internally and externally.
• We set SMART goals.

Updated/Created Policies:

• We created a Sustainability Strategy.
• We created a Sustainability Policy.
• We updated corresponding policies where we were lacking, and updated older policies to provide a clear sustainability strategy.

Training:

• We provided staff with training and support on sustainability best practices relevant to their roles.
• We encouraged employees to act as sustainable ambassadors.

Supply Chain Integration:

• We collaborated with suppliers and partners to adopt sustainable practices throughout the supply chain, choosing environmental best practices, sourcing locally, and requesting packaging to always be recyclable.

Continuous Improvement:

• Innovating, embedding, monitoring and re-evaluating our sustainability objectives and outcomes.

Surrey Physio is the UK’s leading physiotherapy group on being “green”. We will continue to work hard to make continuously monitor things we can do to improve our impact on the environment, our internal carbon footprint, as well as externally addressing health inequalities and preventative care to support the wellbeing of the people in the communities where we live and work.