Promoting responsibility through collaboration

In 2020, we continued to improve on the collaboration networks established in the previous year and also established new partnerships.

The Keino Competence Center is an important platform through whose developer groups we have collaborated with other hospital districts to promote ethical procurements. We have also organized thematic discussions about various product groups through Keino, both among procurement units and between them and suppliers. Another important partner, Sailab Medtech Finland, has also been involved in these discussions. We also continued our dialogue with Finnwatch, and we are planning further project-based collaboration going forward.

The cooperation agreement we signed with the central procurement unit for Norway’s hospital districts (Sjukhusinköpp) and the Swedish national procurement unit in 2019 has been fruitful; the coordination group meets about every two months to share experiences and to foster Nordic cooperation. In a new departure in 2020, we got involved in the work of national procurement strategy theme groups in aspects of social and ecological corporate responsibility.

Responsibility is an important value for stakeholders

Transparent stakeholder cooperation with continuous improvement is very important for us. Our responsibility program was designed in close dialog with our internal customers, our contract suppliers and NGOs in the field of corporate responsibility.

We have identified as stakeholders those parties that are impacted by HUS Logistics operations and those that have an impact on HUS Logistics.

Based on the stakeholder survey we circulated in 2019, our personnel, customers and suppliers alike consider responsibility to be an important value, and we received encouraging feedback on our responsibility efforts. The most important responsibility themes named by all respondent groups were responsibility as an employer and upholding manufacturing conditions consistent with human rights and fundamental principles and rights at work in risk countries.

Continuous improvement of operations

Our customers include HUS divisions, the HUS Specific Catchment Area and HUS member municipalities. All of these have their own strategic goals to whose attainment we make an important contribution. We aim to improve our operations continuously in order to contribute to these goals as well as possible, working systematically and effectively with our stakeholders. Networking and stakeholder relations are important means for maintaining our expertise and our understanding of our customers’ needs, which is why we are involved very closely for example in the network of procurement units in the Helsinki metropolitan area.

Stakeholders in respect of responsibility