UK: Building Resilience In The Health / Medical Business Arena

We live and work in a world which is facing more change than perhaps ever faced before, leading to the proliferation of phrases such as the new normal; flexibility; adaptability and agility. Regardless of the words we use to describe it, what we are all referring to is the need to look at the challenges that face us and consider what we can do to ensure not just business survival but growth.

Mills & Reeve published Building Resilience: what clients want from their law firms at the end of 2020. To gain the insights detailed in the report we surveyed clients, non- clients and multipliers across a range of sectors. You can read the report here.

The report explores four key areas:

• Innovation  - applying strategic thinking to business scenarios and finding innovative solutions to complex problems
• Understanding  - law firms that truly understand their clients, that do everything to get to grips with the nuances of their individual organisation, their markets, structure, objectives and strategy
• Change and regulation - keeping pace
• Tech transformation - people first

The turbulence of the past 12 months has posed many challenges and will continue to do so but according to the results of a YouGov survey we commissioned in early 2021, the consensus across UK's businesses is one of optimism.

In both our Building Resilience report and the survey we talk about "resilience": the capacity to recover quickly from challenges and to identify new opportunities to grow our business. 

However, the survey revealed that nearly a third of businesses are actually looking to cut costs and just one in five business owners plan on prioritising employees in the year ahead, despite record highs of unemployment and a mental health crisis following the pandemic.

For many, data is touted as the answer, but do business leaders know how to use it? Over 50% of the business owners interviewed by YouGov in February 2021 said they do not know what to do with the data they have, or that they simply do not have quality data available to them.

Meanwhile the survey revealed that businesses are prioritising price over sustainability when it comes to their supply chains. Over a quarter of those interviewed never audit their supply chain's compliance with ethical and sustainability contract requirements.

Despite the changing attitudes towards more sustainable and ethical products and practices, 47% of businesses said they prioritise price in comparison to just 14% that prioritise sustainable and ethical practices. However, there are big regional variations with 21% of London businesses prioritising sustainability compared to just 9% in Yorkshire and Humber.

We have analysed the feedback we received by sector and set out below some interesting specific medical and health services related results:

It is great to see that medical and health businesses surveyed have nearly the highest sector score in terms of growing business and do have the highest score in terms of introducing new services. 

However, of all of the scores above two really jumped out at us:

• Data: There isn't sufficient data available for my business to make important planning decisions

• ESG (Environmental Social Governance): Only 8% of medical and health businesses surveyed prioritise sustainable / ethical products and practices and nearly a quarter of such businesses do not audit the sustainability of their supply chain at all.

Supporting you

As the importance of ethical behaviours moves higher up the agenda, how can it be managed within medical and health businesses to avoid becoming the next set of headlines or, as a positive, the unique selling point that sets you apart?

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