Supplying Your Medical Equipment from our Clean, Green Building
It's important to you, and to us, that our medical equipment supply operation has minimal impact on the environment. So we're thrilled to be headquartered in our own smart new building which boasts excellent green credentials. Medisave House, in Weymouth, has been awarded Excellent status under BREEAM, the foremost environmental rating system for buildings. In practice, this means our new home serves us well today, without creating negative consequences for future generations. Here are some of the features that allow us to do business without gouging a massive carbon footprint into the glorious Jurassic Coast, where we are based.
Harvesting the plentiful Dorset sunshine
The roof of our office and warehouse building in Weymouth is covered with solar panels that convert our lovely seaside sunshine into cheap, green electricity. The panels (photovoltaics or PVs as their known) are hard at work even on cloudy days, generating power from the sun's rays. Our sunshine harvest is so rich that we don't need to draw electricity from the national grid we actually contribute to it. Medisave doesn't just supply great value medical equipment we're also a generator of renewable power. It's not just the PVs that enjoy catching a few rays. In addition to our staff kitchen and relaxation room (complete with a soothing digital aquarium), we have a dedicated outdoor seating area. If that's not enough, our staff can hop onto a company bike for the short cycle ride to the beach!
Lighting for a comfortable life
While the sunshine outside makes us feel good and can be converted into electricity, the lighting indoors can also affect our mood and our health. Fluorescent lights, the popular choice almost everywhere, have been shown to have a generally negative effect on people who work beneath them for long periods of time. We've chosen to install high frequency lighting across the building, as this is considered to be best practice for long-term comfort. We also make sure that everyone working with a computer screen for most of the time is just a few metres away from a direct view through an external window.
Keeping the air clean
We can't see them, but VOCs (volatile organic compounds) are all over the place. These air pollutants, which can affect the way we breathe, come from a variety of sources, including paints and other coverings used in construction. We took great care to ensure that the paints and adhesives used in the building of our office had low VOCs. You can tell the VOC of a product simply by looking at the small print on the back of the tin, but it took some control to ensure that all the products used in different areas of the building comply with the standards we wanted to achieve.
Ensuring appropriate liquidity levels in the business
As a nation, we use more than three times as much water now as we did 30 years ago. While this means we may be a lot cleaner, these levels of water consumption put massive pressure on the environment. To play our part in using water more responsibly, the Medisave building bathrooms have been designed to use as little of this precious resource as possible. We've also installed flow meters to help monitor the rate at which we're using water, as these help us to spot when something is going wrong, such as a leak.
Lessening our impact on the wider environment
Our responsibility for the environment reaches out beyond the front gate, along the roads that our staff travel to and from their workplace. We are cycle to work compliant, which in practical terms means we have showers, lockers and a cycle shelter. We've already mentioned the company bikes. Our brand new, sturdy machines are available for staff to use during their midday break, whether it's to pop up the road to the supermarket or explore the local area. For the last 15 years we've been supplying the UK's GP surgeries, dentists, hospitals and vets with top brands at low prices. We don't want this value to come at a cost to either the local or national environment, which is why we invested in BREEAM accreditation for our new office and warehouse facility. The benefits we offer our customers today don't carry a hidden price tag for tomorrow.