Read the audio transcript below:
Dr. Luisa Schuldt (LS): Hi everyone. Welcome to Brush Up, presented by Oral Health Group, the dental podcast where we speak with industry experts to discuss a variety of topics such as technology, finance and practice management. I’m your host Dr. Luisa Schuldt, a dual certified prosthodontist and periodontist based at a Fonthill, Ontario. Today, we’ll be discussing sustainability with Jennifer Kim Field, Chief Sustainability Officer for Henry Schein. Jennifer works for Henry Schein, the world’s largest provider of solutions for healthcare professionals. Jen is responsible for the company’s global environmental, social and governance work for integrating ESG into the company’s strategies and activities. She collaborates with the Company’s Board of Directors, the Sustainability Committee, and key business teams such as Investor Relations, Supply Chain, Finance, Legal, Human Resources, Global Data Organization, and Corporate Communications as well as external partners to develop a global climate roadmap including carbon reduction goals, ensure our progress and performance meet evolving global auditing and regulatory requirements, and attract new investors focused on corporate sustainability. You are a busy lady, Jen.
Jennifer Kim Field (JKF): We’re all doing amazing, incredible things with so many others.
LS: Oh, wow, thank you so much for taking time out of your very busy schedule to chat with us. Sustainability is such an important topic. Please tell us a little bit about the benefits of this and how it can benefit both our offices, our patients, our day-to-day work.
JKF: Sure. And thank you so much for the opportunity and for having me on. I think it’s an incredibly important topic. First, I just say that it’s about education and awareness of the impacts of climate change and the actions we can all take that I think is really key when it comes to talking about the benefits both to the oral health community as well as the patients. So I don’t know if folks know, but it’s widely known through a variety of studies that the healthcare industry makes up around 4.5% of global emissions. So if you were to take the healthcare industry as a country, it would be the 5th largest emitter on the planet. So I think it’s just helpful context to know sort of how dentistry fits in the overall healthcare side of things. Just a few weeks ago, at the end of May, the World Health Organization issued an urgent call for climate action to create more resilient and sustainable health systems. So the links of climate change and health are inextricable, and intricate because it’s increasing non communicable diseases. It’s facilitating the spread of infectious disease, but we know a healthier planet leads to a healthier planet. So if you think about you and I, as day-to-day consumers, we’re getting hit constantly about turning our lights off when you’re not using them, conserving water. I recently was up at my college for my alumni reunion. And there was literally a picture of a baby seal in the like dorm shower that we were staying in being like “conserve water.” I think was the fastest shower that I took because of that. You know, reduce single use plastic. So I think we need to take that concept and that model and provide easy, bite-size awareness pieces for patients to connect going to the dental office as part of their sustainability journey. Because, for example, you could implement steam sterilization methods or use biodegradable disinfectants, which would mean less chemical contamination. And so it’s a healthier environment for patients when they come into a sustainable dental practice. But I do think first and foremost, absolutely, always the first priority is receiving good quality oral care with infection prevention and control in mind, but again, it’s that connective tissue, because I do think patients will appreciate…because from a consumer level again, you just need to translate it into the healthcare side of things that they appreciate being treated in a practice that values sustainability.
LS: Yeah, I think you brought up a couple of the things I find very interesting as well. That the communicable diseases, single-use plastics. All of our masks or gloves, saliva injectors. All these things that I mean it is a load for the environment and putting that on a balance of what has to be done for the communicable disease protection and at the same time, what can we do better to protect the environment? I’m sure your contributions are huge to helping us kind of balance that. What can we as a profession do to try to be more sustainable, protect our environment and still protect our patients?
JKF: Yeah, I think it’s important to note that being environmentally sustainable is about how do you take small actions now to make a great change and impact in the future. And so it is a very long term view of, you know, imagine if there are practices out there now that are sustainable or thinking about sustainability. You know, we want to help them understand how they reduce their operating costs over time. We ourselves at Henry Schein, are doing that as well, but it doesn’t happen overnight, right? So it’s about improving energy efficiency, reducing your waste, and things like that, and that does take time. But we think in the end it will help you attract environmentally conscious patients and remain competitive in an ever-changing healthcare landscape. So again, it’s about that futuristic thinking, but, what easy, simple steps can you take now? And we think establishing a culture where every member of the dental practice is properly trained in these types of sustainable efforts, from proper disposal and recycling procedures, that this training can be adjacent to staff undergoing more formal training around infection prevention and control procedures and protocols. Because again the priority is always providing quality oral care so that infection prevention and control is vital. But as you just mentioned, with the increase of single use products, especially the PPE, right, the personal protective equipment, the amount of waste being disposed over this past year, especially given the pandemic, is definitely increasing. I think you’re going to see that stabilize and what can we do to help that? I think it’s the education that the staff can take to understand how they can apply the proper protocols and processes to be environmentally friendly. But also dispose of hazardous and non hazardous waste properly.
LS: As part of your role at Henry Schein, I’m sure you’re giving the company some really good advice. What is Henry Schein doing currently, or what does it have planned for the near future, to help promote or advance sustainability?
JKF: It’s a really good question and when I joined Henry Schein over six years ago, they made my job really easy because all of this has really been instilled in the company. When Henry and Esther Shine founded the company over 90 years ago, they believed that a sense of purpose and commitment to our values would be key drivers of the company’s success. So all of us would say we have a long, rich history and a long standing history of our overall sustainability work, and particularly as it relates to environmental sustainability. It’s been a core pillar of our Henry Shine Cares program. So what are we doing now, to your question, and how are we putting all of this into action? There’s a couple of things. One is in celebration of Earth Day that happened this past April, we launched a new global program called Practice Green. This is an initiative that was launched in our Australia and New Zealand regions earlier this year. And for those in North America, they might be familiar with the Global Reflections program that we’ve had for over a decade, but now all of this has now evolved into one global brand and umbrella called Practice Green. So what does Practice Green do? It’s about providing eco-friendly services and solutions and support to dentists and doctors around the world and partnership with our suppliers to implement practical ways to become more sustainable. Another initiative is what are we doing in our own operations in our own company? Well, one, we’re continuing to work to continue to strengthen our measurement, monitoring and reporting on our carbon emissions in our overall environmental impacts. We have signed on, a couple of years ago, to the business ambition for 1.5 degrees campaign and what that means is many of those who join are making a commitment to reach net zero global emissions by 2050. So we want to again collectively do our part as well. And so we will submit our science-based target by the end of this year and make some announcements shortly on our carbon reduction goals, so we look forward to sharing more around that. And then finally, who makes up the DNA of our company. It’s our team. Shine members, those are our employees, and we want to engage them globally in our green journey. So last year we established an Environmental Impact Council. And what this is, it’s a compilation of a cross functional global group of middle management senior managers that are really coming together to help guide and operationalize the work that we’re doing that I just mentioned around environmental sustainability and we really rely on them because you really need to amplify the work. One Chief Sustainability Officer is not going to do it. It needs to be a lot of different people who really are championing this alongside you and that’s what it takes – is all of us coming together collectively to help achieve our priorities.
LS: It sounds like our Henry Schein routine contacts are our reps are great resources for more information on what we can do as practices, as dentists, to improve the sustainability of our offices. What would one of the first steps you could recommend for us, an easy way to integrate this into our day-to-day practice?
JKF: So it’s a great question and a great point that you just made. I’d encourage you to go to our Practice Green landing page to learn more so henryschein.com/practice green. There’s a number of resources available to dental professionals on what you can do to take that first step around sustainability, and there’s probably things that you’re already doing that you might not call sustainable, but you’re doing it already. That’s what we found internally within our business teams, and I think it’s because everybody wants to do the right thing. And what does that right thing mean? It could mean being more paper conscious than being paper free. So rather than providing receipts to your patients in paper form, you’re doing it electronically and things like that. But I would encourage all dental professionals to explore what are the steps that make the best sense for your practice and where you are in your sustainability journey, right? That could be building similar to us, like our Environmental Impact Council, building a cross functional team to assess your impact. You know, patient provider safety, the financial health of your organization, it could mean evaluating your products, identify those that could be reused or recycled. It could be running a practice energy audit, but it also could be simple things like putting timers on your office lights or choosing green products. I think that the most important thing is, you know, as I mentioned earlier, all of these small actions add up and can make a difference. And I think it’s, you know, important to keep in mind that today’s patients, especially the younger generation – if you think about it right to Gen. Z’s and on – they’re more interested in sustainability and purpose driven organizations, and I think that having a green practice has the potential to attract new patients and set it apart from others.
LS: You mentioned the website already, and as part of the of the whole team, which you’ve mentioned is participating in this within Henry Schein, our local reps are probably quite knowledgeable and helping us identify products that might be more sustainable on the website. Are these identified in any way, are their markings on the product pages or a way to search these products more easily?
JKF: Per country it will get there. So we’re working to improve our e-commerce platform to do so. And in each country, each one has a variety of marketing efforts. But at the basic level, yes, there are sales flyers that have eco-friendly products. I think you should feel confident that we have built processes and, obviously, we’re the beginning stages of this because we’re mindful that there are impending regulatory rules and discussions that are happening to avoid greenwashing. And so we want to make sure that we are transparent and what it is that we can make claims to, because a lot of it is dependent on our supplier claims, right. If is it made of recycled products, is it made in a sustainable fashion when they manufactured it and things like that? But we continue that journey and hope to get to the point that maybe you could see sort of that green housekeeping seal. That’s our ultimate goal to figure out how to get there. Because again, in the healthcare industry that doesn’t exist. If you look on the consumer product side, you could go into any retail entity and be able to say, OK, what is that more natural product and things like that, but that doesn’t exist in the healthcare industry. And I think again, keeping infection prevention and control in mind, there are some things that the consumer products side can do that the healthcare industry side standardization isn’t there, so we need to move alongside how everyone else is moving. But we want to continue to push the needle and we do that through collaborations and through the various partnership collaborations that we’re part of. So whether it’s the Healthcare Distribution Alliance and many other groups, the Dentistry Trade Alliance as well, FDI World, there’s a lot of different toolkits that exist, that are out there that people can also use as a mechanism of science-based ways in which these third parties are working to verify those green products as well.
LS: I love that it sounds like Henry Schein is taking a good amount of responsibility in not just stamping a sign on there, which when, as you mentioned, when we’re shopping for other types of products, non dental things, whether it’s cosmetic clothes, cleaning products for our home, we see that stamp on there. And what does it really mean? And the fact that you are not doing that without good proper background check and guidelines that will make clear what the most sustainable products is just shows how big the responsibility of this is. And I thank you for working so closely with one of the biggest suppliers of dental products and I’m sure your advice is going to make great waves in what we’re doing for our environment. Is there any last little tidbit? Little bit of advice we can put into practice on our day-to-day that can help us. You already mentioned really valuable things with. Power and lights and talking about it more often, but any last little tidbit or bite for us?
JKF: Just that we are here as a resource. We want folks to be able to rely on us and we want to be able to provide the information that you need to have a sustainable practice, that it will take all of us to make that collective difference. And again, thank you so much for the opportunity, but it’s continuous education and awareness. I think everybody is at a different level of understanding of what this all means. It’s so highly politicized these days, whether you’re talking about certain topics and things like that, but I think that just make sure that it’s coming from a trusted source, that it’s science based, backed in what it is that you’re trying to do. And we can make the world a better place, a healthier planet for healthier people as we say.
LS: Thank you so much for your time. Thank you for joining us, taking some time out of your busy schedule. Thank you to our listeners as well for giving us your time.
Thank you for listening. Be sure to subscribe on Spotify and follow us on social media to be notified every time we post a new episode. Keep brushing up!