JLA’s infection control expert Helen Buchan explores how care homes can make their operations more sustainable without increasing costs – or compromising the quality of their care.
Aware of the challenges care homes face in balancing running costs, quality care provision, and pressure to act on sustainability, JLA recently carried out a UK-wide survey of care home owners and workers to understand the sector’s relationship with ESG.
Consistent themes emerged, with 89 per cent of respondents telling us sustainability is important to their strategy, and 59 per cent setting sustainability goals in their operations. This shows that a large majority of care home operators want to do more, and that, promisingly, many are already are. Indeed, 81 per cent of respondents described setting up energy efficiency initiatives, and 70 per cent of respondents were looking to drastically reduce waste in the near term.
However, 56 per cent of respondents told us that budget constraints are a barrier to movement, 52 per cent cited a lack of time or resource to make meaningful change, and a further 41 per cent reported knowledge gaps inside their organisations, hampering efforts to get initiatives off the ground. This suggests that some providers are unsure where to start on their journeys, and that others believe radical change is either prohibitively expensive, or too difficult to implement.
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