One of the core benefits of working with Medsalv is the impact your hospital will have on social sustainability.
But what does that mean?
This page is dedicated to sharing how we’re helping New Zealand and Australian hospitals deliver social impact.
If you want to know more about the impact our employment practices have on those people with barriers to employment, read on.
SOCIAL SUSTAINABILITY
A few of Medsalv’s team standing in front of a whole bunch of collected devices outside our Christchurch, Otautahi, Remanufacturing Facility. Check the re-usable containers too!
Leonard’s Story
Find out how Medsalv is driving for better Social Sustainability by creating jobs for people facing barriers to employment, in this video featuring Leonard Cullarn, Remanufacturing Team Lead, and Medsalv’s CEO, Oliver Hunt
So what are Medsalv’s Social Employment Practices?
We’ve designed everything about Medsalv to be as sustainable as possible, environmentally, financially, and socially. Social Sustainability means the following at Medsalv:
We do our work as close as we can to our customers, so we employ people locally
We employ New Zealanders at Fair wages, with carefully developed career progression pathways for everyone.
We’ve designed our remanufacturing processes to enable people with barriers to employment to operate them, participate in the workforce and contribute to a more sustainable world, and we preferentially hire people with barriers to employment for these roles.
Once we’ve hired someone with a barrier to employment, we work with them through our specially designed training program to bring their skills up to benefit both themselves and health systems wherever we’re working.
Kilmarnock Enterprises were the inspiration for our Social Sustainability activities - and now it’s part of our DNA!
We’ve made it core to our ethos, because it means it keeps happening.
Why?
When Medsalv was founded by Oliver Hunt back in 2017, he visited Kilmarnock Enterprises during the Summer Startup Program.
Kilmarnock enterprises is an Ōtautahi-based social enterprise creating employment for Kiwis with intellectual disabilities.
Kilmarnock have ISO9001 Accreditation and handle a lot of Pam's food products.
Oliver was instantly keen and taken with the concept, and so he endeavoured to see what Medsalv could do in the same vein.
Initially we tried to put all of our processes in Kilmarnock’s facility, but due to our stringent quality management system requirements we couldn’t do so. Instead, we worked with Kilmarnock to learn how they successfully hired people with barriers to employment.
We took the learnings from Kilmarnock and applied them across the design of all our processes, and Kilmarnock introduced us to a few organisations they worked with.
In the 5 years since we have designed all of our equipment to enable a more diverse group of people to use it, to become our employees.
To date over 30% of Medsalv’s staff have overcome some form of barrier to employment to join our team - that’s over 10 people in New Zealand!
It’s part of our work towards 2 of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals: 8 and 10!
SDG #8 - Decent Work and Economic Growth:
8.5: By 2030, achieve full and productive employment and decent work for all women and men, including for young people and persons with disabilities, and equal pay for work of equal value
SDG #10 - Reduced Inequalities:
10.2: By 2030, empower and promote the social, economic and political inclusion of all, irrespective of age, sex, disability, race, ethnicity, origin, religion or economic or other status
We are directly achieving employment and decent work for people with barriers to employment and empowering and promoting inclusion for all:
By designing all of our equipment and our procdsses to enable a more diverse group of people to use it.
By hiring people with barriers to employment
There is no reason your organisation can’t do the same.
Medsalv’s values help us deliver
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Our leaders are self-aware, imperfect, have a habit of critical reflection and take personal responsibility for inclusion within their teams
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Leaders walk the talk and ensure that Inclusion is an everyday practice, not a bolt-on or an afterthought. Not a meeting gets held, no decision made, and no project delivered where social sustainabilty is not considered.
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Our team is inquisitive about differences, listening to other people’s perspectives and experiences, and inviting diverse contributions, and we recognise we’re not only making remanufacturing accessible for our customers, but for potential employees too.
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We’re ambitious about the number of people we can help, and we take time to develop people as far as we can. Overcoming a barrier to employment is the first step, we want to see everyone we employ succeed, and we want to give as many people a chance as possible.
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Ensuring we make everything we do as simple as possible helps us increase the pool of potential employees we can hire, and helps us hire people with barriers to employment too.
A good example of this is our testing machines, which we’ve optimised to read barcodes instead of requiring manual set up, and to give green light or red light readouts, based on whether a product we remanufacture works or not. This means the burden of training is lower, and more people can operate them safely.
Hear it from our founder
Oliver Hunt spoke about Medsalv’s development, our commitment to sustainability, and how we’ve actioned that in his commencement address for the University of Canterbury’s 2023 Graduating Class.
Skip through to ~6:50 to hear about how we developed our approach, and baked it in to the company.
Social Sustainability - from the start.
Our Social Sustainability Strategies are not a bolt on, they’re part of the fabric of our organisation
What do we mean by this?
Everything we do is designed to do our version of good while we do it, as opposed to generating a profit and then spending that money on something that doesn’t align.
Most businesses wait until they have made a profit to begin thinking about how to give back to society.
These businesses then pledge a certain amount of their profits as donations to a charity, and for some businesses that is the only way they can hope to do good.
The problem with this approach is that their profit margins directly affect their ability to give-back to society, so when times get tough, their contribution to the greater good diminishes. We don’t want our impact on society to be governed by how much money we are making.
To combat this dilemma, we decided to change up the formula. From day one we began weaving our social, environmental, and financial strategies throughout Medsalv’s organisational fabric, so they cannot be distinguished from our normal operations.
Every aspect of our operation is designed to do good, and do it sustainably, so that it withstands the test of time, as well as economic and political fluctuations. It also helps that we don't have to spend time and resources ensuring that our donations are being used effectively. Instead, we make it our mission to be the change we want to see in the world.
For a comparison, we view donating profits instead of working impact into the business model as the equivalent of a large corporate taking down a rainforest that has stood for millennia for palm oil, then planting another forest to replace it.
Our version of doing this might be to find a way to avoid using the palm oil in the first place, or to establish a new plantation and harvest from that alone - employing local people to do so, and leaving natural forests untouched.
It takes deliberate action, from the start:
We’ve been successful in our approach to sustainability as we didn’t set up an unsustainable business and then try and fix it, we deliberately approached every thing we do with sustainability as imperative.
From a social sustainability perspective, that meant we helped our 3rd hire overcome a barrier to employment - and we’ve kept that up:
“If we tried to bolt it on today, it would be much much harder, it would cost more and it would probably fail.”