At Accord, we’re always looking for new ways to improve the lives of people around the world. By leading a wide range of positive causes and initiatives, we’re making a real difference to our environment and the communities people live and work in.
Even in the toughest times whilst continuing to supply essential medicines, we never press pause on our corporate social responsibility (CSR).
Our CSR objectives can be categorised into two key pillars:
1. Improving access to life-changing medicines to patients across the globe
2. Reducing our environmental footprint and working in harmony with our local community
Improving access to life-changing medicines to patients across the globe
The aims of International Health Partners (IHP), to eradicate suffering caused by poor access to medicine very closely align with Accord’s mission to increase access of life-changing medicines to patients. With this common goal in mind, we have continued to work closely with IHP to:
• reach out to organisations who work with groups on the ground in impoverished and war-torn/hard to reach communities
• give back to countries and communities which do not have access to affordable medicines
• utilise the company’s global supply chains and logistics to help to deliver medicines to partners who can distribute them on the ground and ensure their safe receipt
Accord have supported IHP to help people in hard-to-reach, vulnerable and disaster-hit communities to get better access to medicine by overseeing, coordinating, and delivering strategic medical donations. Together with supporting disaster response and long-term healthcare programmes, IHP deliver Essential Health Packs (EHPs) – these are pre-packed kits, filled with a range of essential medicines, to support critical primary health care delivery in any setting.
During the pandemic, when IHP approached us and said that they were struggling with reduced donations, we provided our largest ever donation of critical medicines.
Reducing our environmental footprint and working in harmony with our local community
Accord demonstrates its commitment to reducing its environmental footprint with a series of organisational initiatives every year.
We aim to be a zero-waste company and as such we have key objectives to ensure we recycle not only the waste from our manufacturing processes, but at every level of the organisation.
• Keep cup – Whilst we are conscious of the big actions we take to ensure we are a zero-waste provider, we never forget the little actions that can really make a difference too. We calculated that over the course of a year over 72,000 cups of coffee are served by the site catering teams. Accord instigated a ‘keep cup’ scheme to encourage employees to use a recyclable cup saving 54,000 single use coffee cups going to waste. The CO2 savings are equivalent to driving a car, non-stop for 144 hours.
• Everycan counts – It wasn’t only our coffee cups that got a piece of the action – since March 2019 we have partnered with a local non-profitable charity Community Resource, an organisation that provides work opportunities for adults with learning disabilities to create the ‘Everycan counts’ initiative. As part of the initiative Community Resource collects our waste drink cans and benefits from recouping the cost of recycling. Over 12 months we have recycled enough cans to equal the CO2 savings of 1,380 television hours.
• Save the trees – As part of our commitment to zero-waste we implemented a wood pallet recycling scheme to help reduce the number of climate saving trees being harvested. Throughout the course of a year we recycled 10,000 wooden pallets that are used in our site operations. We saved 1,200 trees!
We would love to hear what steps you are taking in your pharmacy to make it better for your community and the environment.
