The Vision

Central London Community Health (CLCH) is committed to reducing its environmental impact and providing sustainable healthcare to ensure better health for future generations. To do this the trust wanted to embed a sustainability model of care and ensure its estates were as efficient, sustainable, and resilient as they could be.
Elizabeth Hale, the trust’s Green Plan and Net Zero lead said “When we published the Green Plan back in July 2020, the key areas of focus were both personal: provide staff with alternative means of transport to minimise the impact of travel with bikes, e-bike, and electric vehicle (EV) loan scheme and organisational, by our commitment to support remote and mobile working; reduce waste; move to more efficient equipment, install EV charging points; improve logistics to reduce the energy and carbon we use annually.”
In addition to the Green Plan, CLCH undertook a carbon footprint analysis across its estates in 2021, the result of which fed into numerous projects to support the trust and the wider NHS with its Net Zero by 2040 target for emissions it controls.

What CLCH Did

During the initial stages of investigating, CLCH wanted to get an understanding of what sort of EV chargers were needed, how many and what the potential utilisation would be. om Wright, Sustainability Director and Salwah Koriya, Project Manager, decided that the best course of action would be to take a two-phased approach to the project.
Phase one saw CLCH go out to the market in search of a supplier to help them with consultancy work through procurement. Phase two would deal with implementing the end-to-end delivery plan from the acceptance to sign-off, to installation. For phase two, CLCH used a third-party organisation, QARMA, to manage their bid/tender requirements

The Challenge

The challenge faced by CLCH implementing this project was limited knowledge around building a sustainable EV infrastructure in an organisation with a large staff base, a vast geographical area and a very diverse estate.
To counter this gap in knowledge tender winner, Blink Charging (Formerly EB Charging) was appointed to provide consultation support and advice. From that point on, CLCH were able to decide that they would initially roll out the EV chargers for staff usage only and open this out to the public. However, this would open another challenge of how they would ensure preferential use by the staff to ensure priority was given to those individuals. As the project evolved some external challenges were faced, including technical and time delays.
Salwah Koriya, Project Manager Manager Capita working on behalf of CLCH said:

What Blink Charging Did

Due to the nature of EB’s ethos, ‘right charger, right location’, we were successful in our bid to work with CLCH as their consultancy partner.
To start the process, EB undertook a feasibility analysis and provided an extensive evaluation report back to trust Sustainability Director, Tom Wright. Our project team laid out our findings including our thoughts on how best to address the project and the desired outcome, alongside potential emission savings that may be found should they proceed forward with our proposal.
Following our initial assessment, we put forward a secondary proposal for the tender that was put out by QARMA. In this proposal, we outlined the entire project from start to finish in a complete turnkey offering, a ready-to-go solution that could easily be deployed across the trust. This covered how EB would install the chargers at the various locations, how the chargers would be managed and reported on through an OEM solution and how we intended to learn and replicate the installation across the trust.

The Solution

EB’s solution saw the production of site surveys, site designs, power requirements and future-proofing options for long-term spread within the organisation that would allow CLCH to expand their current network of EV charge points to include public usage if, and when, desired. This resulted in the installation of 41 Eve Single Pro-line chargers across nine CLCH sites covering London & Hertfordshire. These secure, compact single chargers with user-friendly LCD screens offer advanced smart functionality. While this was accepted, EB supported CLCH by providing additional, specialist support when applying for funding.

Future Proofing

There is thought from CLCH about expanding the EV Infrastructure to additional sites, however further considerations need to be taken into account as mentioned by Tom, “Not all sites used for the provision of services are owned by CLCH, so we would need to liaise with our estate third parties to understand how best to move forward with this”.
In the future CLCH plans to increase the number of EV charging points and open up their network to patients. Options for a new solution have since been proposed but EB for iBay and Shift ++ is a solution that would allow for staff to book bays and ensure they had priority charging available on-site when they needed it. This is an ongoing scenario for CLCH but plans are being worked on how they continue to maximise the EV Infrastructure and increase utilisation against their green plan.
requirements. Options for a new solution have since been proposed but EB for iBay & Shift ++ is a solution that would allow for staff to book bays and ensure they had priority charging available for when they need it. This is an ongoing scenario for CLCH but plans are being worked on how they continue to maximise the EV Infrastructure and increase utilisation against their green plan.

To see how we can support your EV Charging Infrastructure contact us today.