GSP-AHC-04: Environmental Management Plan for Access Health and Community

BACKGROUND:

Access Health and Community (AccessHC) provides high quality health and community services for its local community, focussing its efforts on those who have reduced access or increased complexity due to their health, social or personal determinants. It is Australia’s oldest community health service and is now a major player in health and community services in the inner eastern suburbs of Melbourne.

The organization has 15 sites across the cities of Yarra, Boroondara, Manningham and Whitehorse with more than 350 staff and over 250 Volunteers. The sites range from large three storey mixed clinical and office buildings of 50-80 staff to small residential houses converted into community houses, or bases for outreach staff. Three properties are owned by AccessHC, some are collocated with other services, and the remainder are rented from councils. This means there is a mix of energy and waste streams and contracts and a mixed ability to create change due to constraints of the tenancy or property type.

AccessHC is highly committed to be a greener workplace. AccessHC would like to engage RMIT students in a project to assess its environmental performance and then develop an environmental management plan for the whole organisation.

The environmental performance assessment focuses on 3 main areas:

  • Energy Consumption
  • Water Consumption
  • Waste Generation

KEY PROJECT TASKS:

  • Baselining and benchmarking study on water management at AccessHC’s sites;
  • Making recommendations on what changes AccessHC could implement on the short, medium and long term for sustainable and efficient water management;
  • Setting up a monitoring and reporting system for sustainable water management.

DELIVERABLES:

No. Description Initial Timing Estimate
1 Background research and literature review October 2020
2 Baselining and benchmarking study November – December 2020
3 Environmental targets (recommendations) January 2021
4 Action Plan and Communication Plan January 2021
5 Environmental Management Plan February 2021
6 Final presentation and report February 2021

The project report shall be written up as an environmental management plan. A suggested template includes:

  • Executive Summary
  • Introduction:
  • Background
  • About the organization
  • Prior actions and achievements
  • Environmental Policy
  • Baseline Environmental Performance
  • Overview
  • Energy Consumption
  • Water Consumption
  • Waste Generation
  • Environmental Targets:
  • Overview
  • Energy consumption
  • Water consumption
  • Waste Generation
  • Action Plan
  • Communication Plan (optional)
  • Monitoring, Review and Continuous Improvement

The project deliverables shall be written for a wide audience. It should be assumed the majority of the readers do not have an in-depth understanding of energy efficiency audits.

WORK METHOD:

TBD

KEY ATTRIBUTES:

Attributes required include:

  • Research skills
  • Intermediate understanding about environmental management and sustainable development
  • Self-motivated.

 

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