Overview
NHS England runs the world’s largest public health system and cares for more than 56 million people in the United Kingdom. They buy everything from plasters to ambulances and MRI scanners through 80,000‑plus suppliers. That purchasing power has a potential to transform: its supply chain alone creates around 4 % of all UK greenhouse‑gas emissions.
To play its part in local and national climate goals, the NHS set a bold vision to reach net-zero by 2045 with an interim 80% reduction target by 2032 for scope 1 and 2 and 2036 for scope 3. In addition, it will require all suppliers to report on emissions and publish reduction targets by 2027 and will introduce product footprinting requirements from 2028 to help lower the carbon footprint of every product it purchases.
A significant challenge is that new sustainability initiatives, guidance and rules on medical waste, circular design and med‑tech sourcing arrive almost monthly, each with its own data asks and timelines. Writing policies, training staff and lining up thousands of suppliers takes time—yet the window to comply keeps shrinking. On top of that, data systems, verification tools and supplier capacity still need to mature.
To prepare for and deliver change, NHS England needed to understand the best practices, hidden dependencies and big levers towards the 2028 goal.
The Solution: A Regulatory Horizon Scanning Framework and Tool
NHS England partnered with FuturePlanet to co-create a regulatory horizon‑scanning framework that could:
🔎 Create a clearer understanding of relevant sustainability rules and industry initiatives
🔎 Rank which ones are really relevant to and help with the 2028 target
🔎 Connect NHS teams directly to the experts behind the rules
🔎 Keep them up to date with emerging standards
Working in collaboration, NHS England and FuturePlanet followed the approach below:
👉🏽 Experts in the FuturePlanet team scanned thousands of pages of policy papers and journals to find relevant initiatives. With the help of our AI tools, in-house experts and community insights, we developed and analysed the list of 110 initiatives in less than two weeks.
👉🏽 18 high‑priority initiatives were shortlisted alongside key recommendations to increase efficiency, inform strategy and purchasing policy development. THe team co created a materiality matrix to rank each initiative across multiple dimensions including its impact on the target, ease of adoption and strategic benefit for patients and staff.
👉🏽 We turned findings into quick‑read dashboards for leaders, one‑page guides for buyers, and a live database for analysts.
👉🏽 We mapped each key rule to its regulator or industry champion and set up direct links to NHS leads.
👉🏽 We built an ongoing monitoring framework that allows the flagging of new initiatives or developments when they appear to keep the roadmap current.
