As an organisation focused on pharmacy-led health and beauty, promoting and supporting a range of initiatives that improve the health and wellbeing of the communities in which we serve is a natural and fundamental position for our businesses to take.
We have a strong heritage in providing available, accessible and affordable healthcare services and products to patients and customers - for over 160 years, Boots in the UK has championed the right of everybody to access affordable quality medicines thereby improving their general health and wellbeing.
In addition, our team at Alliance Healthcare UK continues to provide customers with many ways to stay healthy including, patient focused services, webprescriptions and its weight management service.
Today the real challenge is about keeping people healthier for longer. Whether addressing the causes, symptoms and impact of chronic illness that blight so many lives or helping people to cope with the stresses of modern living, Alliance Boots is committed to helping its customers and patients.
Please read about some of our initiatives to promote community healthcare via the links below:
Laughter is the best medicine – it strengthens the immune system, favours the healing processes and dispels boredom in hospital. This is the philosophy behind the foundation ‘Humour helps curing’ - the initiative of the doctor, satirist and author Eckart von Hirschhausen (well known in Germany from his radio and television appearances). The foundation organises clown visits for children in hospital and this way promotes therapeutic laughter in young patients.
‘Humour helps curing’ is focused on children and, for the second year running, was the chosen charity of our pharmacy network, Vivesco. In the last six years, Vivesco has committed itself, together with its partner pharmacies, to community health – often beyond medicines supplies. Between October and the end of November 2010 around 1,100 Vivesco pharmacies sold high-quality felt key ribbons to their customers. For each ribbon sold, €1 was donated. Proceeds of €40,000 were increased to €70,000 by Vivesco, which all added up to many hundreds of hours of children’s laughter in hospital wards.
Alliance Healthcare Norge works with OK Service, a sheltered employment organisation which provides work for people who otherwise would have difficulty in finding a job, often through learning disability.
The OK Service workshop used by Alliance Healthcare Norge provides a valuable service cleaning and maintaining its green plastic tote bins. Thousands of green plastic bins are shipped to pharmacies every month with their ordered products of all kind. Over time these bins may get damaged or dirty through accidental spillage.
Every Christmas we invite all our OK Service workshop employees to join us for a lunch at Alliance Healthcare Norge offices so that they can see how we use the bins and appreciate the importance of the work they do.
Over many decades, BCM in the UK, which is part of our contract manufacturing business, has supported many local charities and communities schemes – not just through fundraising, but also by offering their time and skills for the benefit of others, often less fortunate, in the local community.
More recently BCM in the UK helped out ‘Cares for Kids’, a unique charity set up in Nottingham to address the problem of primary school children who are malnourished and not attending school.
The charity, which is run by Business in the Community, received donations from BCM of raffle prizes which were distributed amongst schools in Nottingham and then used for fund raising activity. Each school was given four prizes consisting of a large No7 basket, plus a female, male and children’s toiletry gift set.
‘Cares for Kids’ is a partnership of businesses, schools and volunteers that is changing children's lives and raising their aspirations. Business funding, volunteers, parents and teachers have come together to create breakfast clubs which give children the best start to the day.
Breakfast clubs educate children on the benefits of a healthy diet and nutrition and they also help integrate the families with the schools and create better communication between teachers and parents, offering parents the opportunity to go to work/training. Arriving from 8am onwards, children eat whilst learning life skills including sitting at a table to eat, manners and interacting with their peers.
“The donations which we made to ‘Cares for Kids’ went directly to all of the schools involved. It allowed us to build relationships with those schools around Nottingham which we may not have had before. Obviously this is great news for BCM and we are more than willing to help them out.” BCM staff sales representative.
Boots UK continued to support the national Eisteddfod of Wales, one of Europe’s largest and oldest annual cultural festivals, which attracts over 150,000 visitors a year. To mark a decade of support, a Boots on-site shop was set up, as well as a stand promoting health and wellbeing. Boots UK Welsh speaking pharmacists conducted over 1,000 blood pressure checks and Body Mass Index checks throughout the week as well as providing over 300 No7 customer makeovers.
At a celebration of the 10th anniversary of Boots UK’s support for the National Eisteddfod, the Welsh Assembly Government Minister for the Welsh Language, Alun Ffred Jones, said “Boots is leading the way in making health services available to patients in Welsh as their first choice language.”