Falck’s purpose is to advance sustainable healthcare to meet people’s changing needs. We wish to improve patients’ quality of life, protect the climate and work smarter. This means taking a different look at patients and transforming the way we deliver our services. For example, if we can treat people at home instead of driving them to the hospital, it will improve their wellbeing and at the same time reduce carbon emissions.
As an example, we are transitioning our fleet to electrical vehicles, testing health drones that can replace our fleet services, and investigating technologies to prevent hospitalisations and expand homecare solutions.
We work on reducing emissions from existing ways of solving our services. We are reducing emissions from our fleet by converting it to electrical vehicles to the extent possible, improving fuel efficiency. We are testing other solutions.
read more about our transitioning to green fleet here
We have just committed to Science Based Targets initiative, and we will in this journey seek for e.g. medical goods and services with less CO2 footprint.
read more about commitment to Science Based Targets initiative
We strive to find smarter ways to deliver our services. We focus on identifying smarter solutions than e.g. driving healthcare professionals out to patients and moving things physically. Online consultations and digitalisation of services are some of the alternative ways of working.
In Colombia, we have transferred 40% of the 1.5 million annual physical consultations with online medical assistance. This reduces the climate footprint and we get more out of the individual resource. A doctor can help 5 times as many patients.
At the same time, we reduce emissions we also increase quality of life for our customers and patients.
We innovate new technologies to deliver our services, and here drones play a central role. In Greenland, we are running a project with the Greenlandic authorities, where we test the use of drones to transport blood samples and vital medicine between settlements and the hospital in Nuuk. It reduces the climate footprint, and can provide a faster diagnosis, which can prevent serious illnesses and hospitalisations.
In the future, we also expect to be able to fly paramedics in drones on green power to remote places to provide faster initial treatment and quick assess the seriousness of the situation. It could turn out, that there is not a need to send an ambulance.
We consider how to anticipate and prevent the need for ambulances or other vehicles.
A large proportion of the trips by our ambulances are for patients with two to three chronic critical conditions such as diabetes and COPD (Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease). These patients are very vulnerable to small influences such as slight dehydration, small incorrect dose of medication or a minor inflammation. But often it takes several days from the time the impact has occurred until it turns into an acute condition.
The transformative ideas evolve around developing solutions that can measure patients 24/7 at home. For instance, patients could have treatment enabled by digital solutions.
