An initiative which charged local care home residents with creating new telemetry bags to drive down waste at an Icelandic hospital is a shining example of how circularity can be brought into the healthcare sector and help reduce its impact on the planet, Health & Protection’s third annual IPMI Summit has heard.
This is according Beth Stagg, director of communications and marketing at Health Care Without Harm Europe, who was addressing delegates yesterday.
Health Care Without Harm works to drive change from the healthcare sector which accounts for 5% of global emissions, a figure that would make it the fifth largest country in terms of emissions.
Citing the example from Iceland, Stagg explained that hospitals create lots of linen waste and use lots of textiles.
“What they looked at was all this waste they’ve got. Within the cardiology wards they’d got all these telemetry bags which were expensive and they would be used for a couple of days and then they would go in the waste,” Stagg said.
“So they created a community project with the local design studio to have residents in a care home to sew with the discarded textiles to create new bags which would then go into practice.”
And with the initiative saving €8,000 a year, Stagg added it had then been picked up by another ward in the hospital.
“It’s also shown the difference that can be made when we bring communities together on these initiatives, and shows that it is possible to reduce waste and bring circularity into the healthcare sector.”