A Strategic Double Materiality Assessment
Global Healthcare
Key Lessons Learned:
Don’t be restricted by process. Listen to the business. Sustainability cannot operate in a silo, real value comes from focusing on risk, resilience, and value creation.
Challenge
A global healthcare provider needed to comply with CSRD while wanting to identifying 3–5 of its most strategic sustainability priorities. A previous assessment identified 13–15 material topics, risking dilution of focus and overwhelming leadership with an unfocused list of “material” issues.
Solution
Our team applied our four‑stage assessment framework to deliver a CSRD‑compliant DMA while also enabling more strategic aligned priority identification:
Phase 1: We consolidated and validated what mattered by reassessing the impact risks and opportunities, stakeholder input, landscape analysis, and business priorities.
Phase 2: We reviewed and assessed the current state using healthcare‑specific benchmarks to understand the full materiality landscape, reassessed and retested scoring methodologies.
Phase 3: We prioritised and designed practical solutions by intentionally stepping beyond the the DMA metholdoology constraints, using senior-level workshops focused on risk and value creation to distil the 13–15 topics into 3–5 business‑aligned priorities.
Phase 4: We supported cross company dissemination of the assessment to support and embed these priorities across the organisation.
Outcome
The strategic DMA delivered a unified, organisation‑wide view of 3-5 material sustainability topics. Leadership gained clarity on which issues were genuinely material, why they mattered, and how they connected to the wider business strategy. The work also created a defensible evidence base that could be used across regulatory disclosures, investor communications, while also driving a clear focused sustainability strategy.
By translating a complex assessment into a practical, prioritised set of priorities, the organisation was able to move forward with confidence equipped with a DMA that was both regulatory compliant and strategically meaningful.
