About us
Corporate social responsibility
As a healthcare business serving every community in the UK, Alliance Healthcare is intrinsically linked to the welfare of people in local communities. We are a highly people-oriented business and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is an integral part of the way we work — at every level of the company.
Our strategic approach is to ensure that our business practices are socially, environmentally and economically sustainable. Our employees are also very ‘hands on’ in supporting their community at local and national level through employee volunteering and charity fundraising.
What does this mean in practice?
We focus our efforts in areas where we believe we have a real contribution to make. We have identified 16 of these and have grouped them under four main headings:
Environment — Carbon management
Energy, transport and waste and recycling
In a business with multiple daily deliveries, managing our carbon emissions is top of our environmental policy. Alliance Healthcare has won a National Transport award for reducing its delivery routes by 1 million miles. We are also managing our waste and recycling programmes further and closely monitoring our energy output.
Community — Community healthcare
Charitable giving, community healthcare, employee fundraising, employee volunteering.
Our teams are encouraged to take part in fundraising and volunteering. Our charity partners, Leonard Cheshire Disability (LCD), CLIC Sargent and The Prostate Cancer Charity were chosen by our people based on their links to family and community.
In addition, we are raising money for Friends of EORTC, a UK charity which supports the European Organisation for Research and Treatment of Cancer (EORTC) Charitable Trust. This is part of a wider fundraising initiative between Alliance Boots and the EORTC Charitable Trust, which aims to raise a total of €5m over 5 years (2012 – 2017).
In the UK, our main fundraising efforts in 2012 will centre on the JOGLE cycle challenge.
Marketplace — Stewardship and integrity
Corporate governance, supply chain integrity, supplier relations, support for community pharmacists.
Our marketplace focus is on the relationships we build with our community pharmacy customers so that we can provide even more support through offering increased pharmacy services, such as flu vaccination training.
Workplace — Employee wellbeing
Health and safety, training and development, diversity, employee wellbeing, valuing our people.
A happy, motivated workforce is the key to any successful business and something we feel very passionate about. We have numerous employee engagement programmes in place which ensure we are constantly striving to create a positive working environment for our people, giving them a voice, a vision and keeping them safe.
CSR Action Group
We have in place a CSR Action Group, ultimately accountable for our performance in these areas. The Action Group is chaired by our HR Director and supported by the Board of Directors. It continually reviews our achievements in these 16 areas as well as our targets and aspirations going forward.
For more information on the Alliance Boots CSR, and to download the 2010 report, visit www.allianceboots.com