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Interview: Dr Tyson Welzel, Group Chief Innovation Officer, Mediclinic

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With HBI 2024 now just weeks away, we spoke with Dr Tyson Welzel, Group Chief Innovation Officer at Mediclinic, about the company’s focus on achieving carbon neutrality as part of its focus on innovation.

“Mediclinic Group is a multinational healthcare provider that currently operates in Southern Africa (South Africa and Namibia), the Middle East (mainly in the UAE), and Switzerland. We also have a 29.7% share in Spire Healthcare Group plc in the UK,” Welzel says.

“The company was founded 40 years ago in South Arica as an acute inpatient care provider with a relentless focus on quality care. Our model involved providing the infrastructure services to doctors that were independent, based on local regulations, As we grew into new territories, our model adapted, to being an integrated health care services provider.”

It is said that change is the only constant and Welzel highlights how Mediclinic has continuously adapted to respond to the ever changing healthcare landscape.

“We have seen migration of care, an explosion in medical advances and technology changes, as well as changes in consumer behaviour, accompanied by regulatory pressures, which necessitated an expansion into additional care settings. 

“We created an Innovation Hub to serve the Group and to look at new ways and means of driving our care provision, with a specific focus on some of the underserviced parts within our organisation. This hub provides support for bottom-up innovation, while driving top-down radical innovation.”

Among its innovation pipeline, Mediclinic is very focused on the move to carbon neutrality.

“Carbon neutrality is one of those items that if you haven’t planned for it, it’ll never happen by itself. As well as adopting the goals of becoming carbon neutral and achieving zero waste to landfill a few years ago, we now have a multi-year budget and plan linked to achieving those exact goals. This is a massive step in the right direction. You can have all the plans in the world, but if you don’t have funding linked to it, it will never happen.

“In some regions like Southern Africa such changes are supported by circumstance. The national electricity provider in South Africa has not been able to satisfy the country’s needs, and we adopted an iterative plan to roll-out solar power for our facilities, with the usual backups that we already have in place.

“In addition, electricity generally only represents about a third of the carbon footprint within healthcare, so for the other two thirds we are being very mindful of the impact of our operations and supply-chain.

“In Switzerland we have significantly reduced the use of anaesthetic gases. In terms water and energy savings, in South Africa we’ve started implementing counter current systems, saving on water as well as making sure that we maximally use the ongoing heat within the system.

“In other areas like Switzerland of course it’s easier, because about half the country is already gaining its electricity from hydroelectric and solar power. We have one hospital in Switzerland that is using a geothermal probe heat pump with probe weights installed to 250m depth, significantly reducing energy requirements for heating and cooling within the hospital.

“A lot of medical waste is incinerated. In addition to the energy used in the incineration, it also generates spent filters which are then also needing to be incinerated. All of this ends up as ash that has to go somewhere. For now, that is a landfill. Eliminating this waste from landfills is where some of the innovation efforts are going to.”

Welzel believes that healthcare providers will not be able to achieve carbon neutrality by themselves: “It will have to be in partnership with the medical device manufacturers, the pharmaceutical companies and other key partners.

“There are already some good initiatives. Some medical device manufacturers are placing bins in theatres to recoup their own precious metals and plastics out of their single-use devices as an example,” he adds.

“They’re great, but they need to become ubiquitous across all the single-use devices we have.”

Given all of these internal and sectoral developments, Welzel is looking forward to “exchanging ideas with other experts and actually comparing notes on how they’re dealing with some of their own challenges” at HBI 2024.

We would welcome your thoughts on this story. Email your views to Daniel Emmett-Gulliver or call 0207 183 3779.