NHS Property Services is responsible for managing and maintaining the property and facilities of the National Health Service in England. NHSPS owns and manages a vast portfolio of properties and ensures facilities are conducive to delivering high quality patient care. Our CSR Strategy has as an aim to protect, improve and promote the health and wellbeing of communities we operate in. We do this through community-led health initiatives, volunteering, and partnerships with charities to support specific health and wellbeing issues.  

We joined the B4SI Network in 2022, a move that underlines our commitment to augmenting our social impact. As we pass the midpoint of our current three-year strategy, we set out to review our performance holistically to identify our strengths and find areas of opportunity where further progress is achievable.  

For this purpose, we engaged with the Social Impact Compass. The project involved having a series of consultations with the B4SI Team, completing a thorough assessment covering all aspects of our strategy and obtaining a management report that offers a detailed analytical breakdown of our performance. This process was a catalyst for many internal conversations. 

The Social Impact Compass provided us with a clear understanding of our strengths and areas of opportunity. Through this process we validated the quality of our planning fundamentals and the strategic alignment of our social impact strategy and what the business is better placed to deliver. This gave us positive news to communicate internally. We also saw the need to strengthen our governance structure and the way we measure and report our social impact. This process and the management report helped us build a shared understanding of our performance and organize our efforts as a team to advance to the next level. Since then, we have organized team functions in relation to the strategy review process and each team member leads and collaborates in specific areas where their expertise and role is most relevant.  

Moving forward we are prioritizing these actions and will consolidate our plan in line with next years’ strategy review process. We will engage with internal stakeholders and the visuals and resources provided by the Social Impact Compass management report will be very helpful to bring people on board and advance our social impact. 

• Laura Mills, CSR Manager, NHS Property Services