The customer
East London NHS Foundation Trust provides a range of mental health, community health, primary care, wellbeing and inpatient services to young people, working-age adults and older adults across 72 sites throughout the City of London, Hackney, Newham, Tower Hamlets, Bedfordshire and Luton.
The challenge
OCS was engaged primarily to improve the food that was being served to the Trust’s community, as well as provide a whole host of other services, including portering, pest control, cleaning and landscaping.
However, the Trust is moving towards becoming a Marmot Trust, to reduce health inequalities and ensure the right building blocks are in place to improve health and stop lives from being cut short in the communities they serve.
Therefore, it needed a strategic partner to help develop and implement a range of initiatives to help East London NHS Foundation Trust become the first NHS Marmot Trust.
One of these initiatives has been to help deliver more appealing and nutritious food to the Trust’s people, while simultaneously reducing food waste, decreasing the Trust’s carbon footprint, and putting money back into the local economy.
The solution
To immediately increase the quality of the food being served, the OCS team recruited ex-military chefs, and retrained staff to create what is now high-end, mass catering.
However, in order to deliver on sustainability goals – as well as create resilience for the Trust in the event of supply chain failure – an innovative solution was identified.
OCS created a brand new ‘catering hub’ – a large warehouse kitted out with freezers, fridges and pick-and-pack facilities, from which food could be distributed. Four days of contingency food can be carried, which means any delays or disruptions can be handled with no impact on service.
Due to food being housed in one central location, OCS has been able to reduce the Trust’s carbon footprint. Whereas previously, articulated lorries delivered daily to 10 sites, seven days per week, only two deliveries per week to one site are required, with food then dispatched to individual sites via smaller vehicles.
The outcome
Today, OCS delivers high-end food to the Trust’s 17 sites, and has significantly improved the quality of service – the previous catering audit score stood at 40%, today, it’s 99%.
In one of their locations, food waste previously stood at 13.5kg per day (40%). This has now been reduced to 2kg per day (6%) through a number of initiatives, including increasing food quality, hot plate recovery (using unsold food to make new products), composting, and ensuring as much of the raw products as possible are utilised.
Composters are soon to be implemented across the Trust’s sites to help achieve similar outcomes.
More broadly, as part of the account’s KPIs, a key part of the project is to develop links with and help support local communities, and invest back into the local community by using local suppliers and staff. To date, 42% of the contract value has been invested back into the local area.
The success of the catering hub, meanwhile, has caught the attention of other NHS Trusts too, with Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust and Essex Partnership University NHS Trust now engaging OCS to provide food from the hub, increasing the sustainability impact even further.
Looking ahead
At the beginning of the relationship, food was of a primary concern – and, while that has been solved, there is still a lot of work to be done more broadly to help the Trust improve sustainability and carbon reduction, and achieve the status of Marmot Trust.
A number of initiatives are already in the works. Sustainability and waste champions, who will help educate people on how to recycle correctly, have been appointed, while composters will be rolled out to other kitchen facilities to decrease food waste.
A cycle-to-work scheme has been introduced to encourage those team members who can, to travel to work by bike, while all management vehicles have been switched to electric.
In addition, a one-product solution has been introduced to replace all other cleaning products. As a biological enzyme, it is safe to go in grey water, and comes in refillable containers – eliminating plastic waste.
While there are operational challenges, as to be expected, OCS grasps them, works to resolve them and continues to keep one eye on the Trust outcomes we are all working towards
Adam Fahn
Assistant Director of Estates Facilities Management, East London NHS Trust