The coronavirus pandemic manifested itself particularly in the procurement of PPE. Despite the extraordinary circumstances, we continued with our corporate responsibility efforts.
In January 2020, we published the Guide to Ethical Procurement for hospital districts. The purpose of this guide, authored by the ethical procurement development team set up at the initiative of HUS Logistics as a joint venture of the hospital districts, is to ensure that the responsibility goals and criteria for procurement are as uniform as possible between the hospital districts.
We published our second GRI-standard responsibility report in spring 2020.
Coronavirus impacts
The year 2020 was dominated by the coronavirus pandemic, which had major impacts on all activities, HUS Logistics not excepted. Specifically, there were worldwide issues with the availability of PPE, but we managed quite well to keep a sufficient supply of PPE available in both specialist medical care and basic health care.
We endeavored to acquire PPE mainly through our contract suppliers, but we were eventually obliged to also acquire large amounts of PPE outside our usual chains of supply. Furthermore, we were involved in relaunching the manufacture of PPE in Finland.
Enhanced plastic collection
As our activities grew, the overall volume of waste grew as well, but we were more efficient at sorting waste, and plastic collection in particular improved significantly: 50% more plastic was collected at Logistics facilities than in the previous year. This translated directly into a reduction in the volume of mixed waste.
Despite the extraordinary circumstances in the year under review, we incorporated ecological and social corporate responsibility in 66 published invitations to tender, about 26% of all published invitations to tender in joint procurement.
Personnel goodwill campaigns, such as the Christmas present collection for Mother and Child Homes and Shelters in Vantaa, succeeded as expected.
Frequent engagement with stakeholders
In 2020, we engaged a great deal with various stakeholders. Cooperation involved the national procurement strategy, procurement units in the Helsinki metropolitan area, the Keino Competence Center, Nordic procurement units and in-house in the ‘Ecological ATeK’ campaign, among other things. Category-specific work in procurements increased goal-oriented stakeholder cooperation with our customers, and category strategies were devised jointly with key stakeholders in each category towards the end of the year. A category strategy involves determining items such as the goals and focus areas of responsibility in that category.
We are also engaging in active dialogue with the supplier market, e.g. Sailab Finland, to ensure that the markets are also prepared to respond to our new, more ambitious requirements.
Our cooperation with Finnwatch continued with competitive tendering on instruments, and the cooperation report was completed in summer 2020.