SDG #3: Promoting good health and well-being

We work regularly with health and care providers across the UK to improve the quality of care they provide. This work ranges from reducing waiting times for emergency care, implementing new models to improve outcomes, to securing funding for a new children’s hospital. We support the development and delivery of proactive, and data-driven preventative care in the community, which is crucial to improving general population health.

We also take the health and wellbeing of our staff seriously. All our staff are offered a comprehensive wellbeing package which provides them with periods of sabbatical, discounted gym membership and anonymous access to psychological support.

SDG #4: Enhancing quality education and life-long learning

We have: delivered user research to improve online training for the National Retraining Scheme; supported a British university to develop partnerships with institutions abroad; and developed a leading partnership across education and healthcare to combine world-class clinical services with cutting-edge health research. We also regularly deliver training to civil servants to improve their problem-solving skills.

Internally, we are committed to our people’s learning and development, as demonstrated by the regular training we provide, our flourishing mentoring scheme, and the flexibility we offer for staff to pursue further education alongside their day job.

SDG #10: Reducing inequalities – realising our mission to improve public services means making them work for everyone, regardless of their race, gender, disability or socio-economic background.

Our work with the NHS has included: exploring ways to improve access to services for those with learning disabilities; tackling racial inequalities in cancer care; supporting Population Health Management approaches to target resources at those most in need; and ensuring digitisation of healthcare doesn’t further marginalise deprived communities. We have also worked with a local council to develop an economic strategy which reduces inequality and tackles homelessness.

Our commitment to reducing inequalities within our organisation is equally as strong. We have overhauled our recruitment processes to tackle unconscious bias and developed active diversity and inclusion staff groups. Our internal D&I champions actively use D&I forums and surveys to improve awareness and promote equal opportunities. Moreover, we have committed to ambitious internal diversity targets, which require our leadership team to be 25% from ethnic minorities by 2025 and 50% female by 2028.

SDG #13: We recognize that the climate crisis is one of the defining issues of our time, and we’re keen to play our part in tackling it.

We were delighted to become a carbon negative organisation in 2021, through a change to our company travel policy, a switch to a net zero office provider and a carbon offsetting scheme. But we want to go further: we’ve therefore committed to ensuring 80% of our supplier and partner contracts are with organisations that have ambitious sustainability policies by 2025.

The PSC has also helped NHS clients tackle climate change through our many projects to improve care. In fact, we have mobilised over £2bn of NHS capital programmes built around transformative models of care that reduce emissions, maximise refurbishment of existing building stock, and are net zero where new builds are needed.

We are excited to be working with public sector clients across central government, healthcare, and other areas on implementing their vision for net zero by 2040.

Sam Rose, Senior Partner and Sustainability Lead at The PSC, said: ‘The UN’s Sustainable Development Goals provide a blueprint for peace and prosperity. At The PSC we believe that better public services are key to a stronger society - we need to challenge ourselves against these four goals to make sure we maximise our impact at every opportunity when working with public services.’

Please do get in touch at hello@thepsc.co.uk if you'd like to find out more about this or if you have some ideas on how else we can improve our efforts.

Authors: The PSC Sustainability Team