We hosted our annual Spring Conference at the H Suite Conference and Banqueting Suite in Edgbaston, Birmingham on Thursday 27th March, themed around the upcoming CQC Environmental Sustainability assessment.
Introduction
Our CEO, Keiron Broadbent opened the day with an opening speech about why the conference was taking place and how we could help with international recruitment, the data security protection toolkit (DSPT) and the rest of our events coming up.
Keiron Broadbent, CEO at West Midlands Care Association
Raj Kumar, Business Development Manager at Ally Cares Acoustic Monitoring System, then took providers through the funding available from their ICB for implementation of sensor-based falls prevention technology.
Session 1
Keiron then introduced our first speakers on a panel session, which included Annie Spilsbury, Net Zero and Sustainability Lead at Birmingham City Council and Jag Khatkhar, Director at Oak View Care Home in Birmingham.
The panel took part in a Q&A session discussing the ‘practical ways to achieve the CQC environmental sustainability requirements and what support was available from local authorities for care providers.
The audience then had the opportunity to ask questions with several providers using this opportunity to find out more about the funding in their local area.
Session 2
After the break, we then moved on to Hannah Montgomery, Director at Grace Cares, who presented about ‘environmental sustainability in a care business and its effect on efficiency’.
Hannah gave some extremely useful tips for providers to implement in their service to decrease their carbon emissions and ensure they could evidence to the CQC that they are doing everything possible to enhance their carbon footprint.
Some of these ideas included:
- staff training and awareness
- incentivising staff through bonuses for delivering environmental objectives (such as recycling correctly in the workplace
- using the UN’s environmental objectives as measurements to analyse your care services environmental performance
We then moved on to our law firm partners, HCR Law, whose representative, Kate Oliver from the Risk and Regulatory team, presented about the new Commercial Recycling Directive and how this will impact businesses.
Kate ran through the many scenarios where businesses will be responsible for their commercial recycling, including in residential care, homecare and rented office spaces.
Kate outlined that those service users in homecare would still be responsible for their own recycling, this would not be the responsibility of the homecare organisation.
There was also guidance on how to have the conversation with a landlord around what the rented office space can do to install correct recycling to meet the directive law.
Session 4
Lastly, we finished with Andrew Childers, CEO at Beyond Procurement, who presented about ‘Decarbonising Your Supply Chain and Making Monday doing it’.
This presentation developed the understanding of the attendees on the different impact carbon emissions has on the planet and how care providers can analyse their businesses impact on this.
Andrew, broke down the system to analyse your carbon footprint and how you can lower it and why this is important, comparing what ‘Net Zero’ and ‘Carbon Neutral’ means.
Exhibitors
We had an incredible array of exhibitors on the day, with our partners coming out in full force, including the following organisations:
- HCR Law
- Citation
- Birmingham City Council Net Zero team
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