Corporate and social responsibility

Medica represents an attractive career development opportunity for radiologists and non-clinical staff.

For radiologists, we are the perfect partner not only as a regular source of supplementary income, but also to support the development of expertise in clinical sub-specialisms. In this way, working for Medica allows already highly-qualified experts to build a portfolio approach to their career and benefit from a breadth and depth of interesting casework and regular feedback as part of the continuous audit process.

For non-clinical staff, we are focused on attracting, retaining and developing our staff to ensure we are well-placed to deliver sustained business growth.

In 2021 we increased our focus on mental health by running a health and wellness survey across the organisation. This resulted in the formulation of a wellness strategy aimed to support our employees across the business. This included running mental health awareness training sessions and wellness-focused coffee mornings.

Our people are our most valuable assets. They have been vital to the success of Medica as market leader in teleradiology in the UK and Ireland, as well as driving growth in our clinical trial imaging business. Our ability to attract, retain and develop a diverse and talented team is crucial to delivering our business strategy and ensuring our continued sustainability going forward. We are determined to make Medica a great place to work and have a firm commitment to equality of opportunity in all our employment policies, practices and procedures. Our recruitment and selection processes are geared to selecting the best candidate regardless of their age, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, full or part-time status, disability and marital status. Our equal opportunities policy ensures that no employee or applicant is discriminated against. We also apply these principles to the recruitment of the radiologists, radiographers, specialist doctors and other clinicians that we contract with across our business.

The Medica team is proud to work for a company that makes a real difference to improving patient welfare and contributes to saving lives. Our NightHawk and Elective services in the UK do this by providing high quality complex reports back to hospitals quickly to support diagnosis of illness and disease that directs the care of the patient. In Ireland, our diabetic retinopathy (DR) screening service can quickly identify and reduce the  likelihood of blindness through a cost-effective screening approach. Further, in the US, we support our clients to analyse imaging data from clinical trials that aim to demonstrate safety and efficacy of novel therapies including for cancer.

Our core business model relies on us to continually ‘“do well by doing good” and through our business model and strong company values, we believe that we will have a positive impact on our people and the Group’s future growth. During 2021, we continued to support our charitable partner RefuAid to sponsor doctors arriving in the UK as refugees as they retrain to become qualified in the UK. Our employees in the UK and Ireland raised further charitable donations, including fundraising for local mental health and homeless charities.

The risks from cyber security continue to rise globally and so too does the need to protect our customer’s patients, our employees and Medica’s other information assets. Cyber and privacy risk is reviewed alongside our wider risk management approach and was regularly reported on by our Head of Information Security & Risk and discussed with the Senior Management Team and Board of Directors. Our UK and Ireland divisions are accredited and certified to a number of quality and security focused standards, including the Quality Standards of Imaging (QSI) and CHKS for our teleradiology operations and both ISO 27001 and Cyber Essentials to support our internal information security management system. In addition to our own internal audit process, our management systems are regularly audited by external certification and accreditation bodies to provide assurance against the standards, our policies and our controls.

We remain committed to maintaining and implementing policies to ensure we operate in a manner that is both responsible and ethical. This is essential to ensuring that our business grows in a sustainable manner. Behaving ethically involves everyone at Medica from our Board of Directors down and all employees are required to abide by our Employee Code of Conduct and is made available via Medica’s internal network. We operate in accordance with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and take account of other internationally accepted human rights standards. We also promote human rights through our employment policies and practices, our supply and value chains.

We publish an annual statement in line with our Modern Slavery Policy and the requirements of the Modern Slavery Act 2015. The Company is committed  to act ethically and with integrity in all business relationships. The Policy is communicated to all workers to ensure they understand the Group’s responsibility and attitude towards modern slavery. The wider corporate policy suite instils ethics and integrity across the organisation.

Medica (UK) conducted a review of the hourly rate of all staff and workers in 2019 to ensure that the National Minimum Wage and National Living Wage was being paid in all circumstances. We continue to maintain this position and obtained the National Living Wage accreditation in early 2021 as a further statement of our commitment.

We continue to maintain and implement policies to ensure adherence to regulations on anti-bribery, anti-corruption, and anti-money laundering. We reviewed our policies and process with external auditors to ensure continued adherence with the Criminal Finances Act 2017.

Medica continues to build on its risk management framework and embed the principles into its business. Risk at Medica is aligned with project delivery and performance management.

Clinical governance is paramount to the successful and accurate delivery of Medica’s critical services. The Group’s Medical Director ensures that clinical risks are regularly reported on and shared upwards with the Board.

Medica actively considers its environmental footprint and the impact that decisions may have on the environment and particularly climate change. As a technology & services focused Group with most of its staff either  working from home or employed in one office location and radiologists contracted mainly from their own homes, we believe our own environmental footprint remains small.

Our environmental policy sets out our core foundation of environmental and sustainability principles.

We continue to maintain our clear approach to recycling by encouraging those in the office to use conveniently placed bins for standard paper & plastic recyclables, and separate secure confidential paper recycling.

We are also continuing to drive the recycling of higher value items such as redundant workstations, laptops, PCs and cabling etc. Our process has been further adopted for non-office based equipment, such as server infrastructure. Due to our approach to re-use equipment where practicable, we did not require any physical recycling by our Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) regulated partners in 2021. We do however have plans to green recycle equipment that can no longer be re-purposed during 2022.

Following a review of our leased UK head office, we have been advised that the building was supplied with 100% renewable source electricity during the year.

Medica Group has five websites. Four of our websites are hosted by a company that powers their hosting exclusively by wind and solar power. The remaining website is in the process of moving across to the same hosting company for August 2022.

Patient outcomes are at the heart of what we do and clinical governance remains paramount to the delivery of our critical services. To ensure the delivery of a high-quality service, we focus on the following areas:

Onboarding: All of our reporters are taken through a thorough review, accreditation and assessment to assure quality of patient care. This is balanced with careful management of reporter engagement, hours worked and wellbeing.

Appraisal: Our high quality appraisal team are now engaging with overseas reporters to assist in regaining GMC registration to further increase our overseas rostered capacity.

Audit: We provided ongoing evolutions of our clinical audit processes to harmonise systems across the clinical aspects of our business. We have changed the focus of some of our internal audit to target patient groups with complex studies such as major trauma so that they were effectively reviewed in a shorter time frame.

Continuing Professional Development (CPD): We drive excellence through our reporter engagement exercises such as feedback surveys, educational seminars and working groups to enhance reporter experience and education.

This year, we continued to offer our pro-bono “pass through” service whereby we collaborated with radiology departments in response to the impact of the pandemic to leverage our network of reporting capabilities. This facilitated the home reporting of internal client work by their own staff utilising our infrastructure. This was provided during 9am – 5pm weekday NHS contracted hours throughout the year. The service has enabled NHS hospitals to utilise their radiologists or reporting radiographers who already contract with Medica, to continue to report from home when required to self-isolate due to COVID-19. As a result, Medica continues to strengthen its relationship with clients and to demonstrate our core values.

In Ireland and the US, our teams worked closely with our clients, including supporting compliance challenges. This year we performed vendor and site audits on behalf of sponsors to utilise the expertise within the RadMD business