Sustainability – International | Life Healthcare

Employee health and safety

We remain committed to protecting our employees' health and safety, and seek to create a working environment supporting this responsibility. We consistently improve our health and safety policies and practices, which became even more critical during this past year.

COVID-19 presented significant challenges to our employees' safety, health and wellbeing. Government measures differed from country to country, and we tailored our responses to comply with local requirements. We also adhered to country-specific government and health policy guidelines within an overarching Group best practice framework. We introduced daily, weekly and monthly reviews in all regions to ensure real-time responses as the situation changed.

Every country we operate in introduced employee-specific measures in line with government guidance, divided between patient-facing and non-patient-facing environments. As part of our patient-facing environments, we:

Ensured the availability of appropriate PPE based on published national guidance
Introduced telephonic pre-screening practices for our patients and, where appropriate, physical screening
Restricted high-risk procedures or patients
Revised PPE measures
Restricted the number of patient and visitors allowed within our facilities

We introduced work-from-home practices across Alliance Medical to protect our non-patient-facing employees, and implemented several wellbeing initiatives. We also restricted internal and external face-to-face meetings.

Our health and safety committee monitors our compliance with relevant laws and regulations in the regions we operate, which includes the UK Health and Safety at Work Act of 1974 and Health and Social Care Act of 2008. We monitor possible radiation exposure for radiology employees as part of our compliance.

Training and development

Our UK business achieved the Investors in People Silver accreditation, recognising the support we provided our people over the past few years.

Investing in our people is critical for the sustainability of our business. Therefore, our employees have access to several training programmes supporting their ongoing development within Life Healthcare. We tailor these programmes to comply with each country's relevant regulatory requirements, and cover several topics. We provide our employees with secondment opportunities within Alliance Medical Group.

We continued to focus on recruiting radiographers. The number of enrolments in our apprenticeship scheme fell slightly from 32 as at September 2019 to 27 at the end of the 2020 financial year, but remains a positive development intervention for our non-clinical teams. Notably, one senior manager successfully graduated from our first masters level graduate apprenticeship. We partnered with 11 universities to provide elective and structured placements at our facilities across the UK. Our clinical graduate programme continues to be successful.

We invested significantly in talent and critical role management, and succession planning for our senior executives this year. This enabled us to understand and benefit from the diversity of our international senior management teams which now include eight nationalities.

Stakeholder engagement

We continue leveraging the strength of our stakeholder relationships to build our business. Our in-country teams are responsible for maintaining these relationships, and manage all engagements at a local level.

Despite the challenges posed by COVID-19, we captured the opportunity to further enhance our relationships with key stakeholder groups. Where appropriate, Alliance Medical accepted government support to provide for employees during temporary layoffs, furloughs or where working hours were reduced. These provisions included deferred insurance contributions and tax opportunities, preferential business loans and employment protection funds. Our employees remained employed in regions where government support was unavailable, and are used to support the steady increase in patient volumes.

Refer to how we create value for more information on how we created value for our stakeholders.

Electricity, water and waste

We remain committed to reducing our impact on the environment and accurately capturing and recording our consumption data.

Alliance Medical submitted its four-yearly ESOS2 Energy Consumption Report in December 2019. The report provides greater visibility of our energy use across all our supply channels. Alliance Medical is also required to submit a report in terms of government's streamlined energy and carbon reporting (SECR) framework for the first time this year, providing commentary on the practical changes undertaken to improve energy consumption and, consequently, our environmental footprint. We are also busy transforming our car fleet scheme to introduce electric vehicles.

Alliance Medical is particularly exposed to radioactive waste due to the nature of its business. We manage this carefully, along with the control and disposal of general, infectious and hazardous medical waste. We comply with international waste disposal guidelines and local in-country requirements throughout this process.

Scanmed

Human capital

Our business's sustainability depends on strong teams with access to development opportunities, quality care, operational excellence, diversified revenue sources and stakeholder engagement. We continue supporting our employees to ensure we remain an employer of choice.

Indicator	Year-on- year trend	2020	2019	2018

Permanent employees and contractors		1 887	2 020	2 095
Temporary employees and contractors		1 464	1 626	1 428
Total		3 351	3 646	3 523

Employee numbers decreased compared to 2019 mainly due to termination of redundant contracts.

Polish law has strict requirements on the type of employee data we can process as an employer. This limits our ability to collate data on our employees' race or ethnicity. However, Scanmed invests significantly in increasing diversity within our teams because promoting equality and diversity among our employees is vital. We implement initiatives aimed at increasing employees' awareness of company values and changes to policies. We also provide training on the importance of data protection, as well as anti-bullying and harassment legislation.

Scanmed continues to implement various initiatives to minimise the shortage of specialised skills among our employees. We periodically conduct employee assessments, enabling us to identify areas for improvement, as well as proposed mitigating actions to close any gaps.

We realise the importance of leveraging the skills of our people. Therefore, we started developing a succession plan for leadership positions within Scanmed. At the same time, we are preparing several management-driven development initiatives to increase employee engagement, motivation and communication.

Employee health and safety

Scanmed is committed to providing a safe and hygienic working environment for employees. Our internal audit processes proactively identify any potential threats or occupational risks at our facilities. We assess the potential impacts of these identified threats or risks, and implement measures to prevent accidents or near misses. We also leverage modern technical and organisational solutions to protect our employees. Our employees regularly attend occupational health and safety training.

We introduced the following additional measures in response to COVID-19 to enhance employee safety:

Our employees have constant access to PPE and disinfectants
We increased the frequency of cleaning and disinfecting of surfaces
Video-conferences replaced traditional meetings

Training and development

As part of our people strategy, we ensure employees and new hires undergo comprehensive onboarding and training to familiarise themselves with the company's values - which extend to sustainable development principles. Furthermore, we regularly examine the training needs of individual teams and departments. Based on this, we then develop targeted development plans to mitigate any identified skills or knowledge gaps.

Our e-learning platform, developed in the previous financial year, proved to be particularly useful during the pandemic. Our employees had access to a range of training activities and programmes. We conducted several mandatory training sessions relating to, among others:

Updates to medical workers' entitlements
Changes to regulations
Improving soft skills
Occupational health and safety
Life Healthcare's Global Code of Conduct
Patient services

We launched training modules relating to the protection of personal data and epidemiology and we are developing a module on patients' rights.

To ease the burden of COVID-19 on our managers, we held several workshops to motivate and engage employees while working remotely.