Hospitals Are Saving Millions and Reducing Their Landfill Load By Reusing Single Use Medical Devices

It’s great to hear that Hospitals are getting into the act on greening up the world. They’re starting to reuse items labeled for single use over and over again- things like scissors, scrubs, and bone cutting blades. This practice is legal as long as the hospital follows certain FDA guidelines, mostly by sending the items out to specialized companies who clean and sterilized them.

Medical device makers are, understandably, upset. They’re forecasting reduced demand for re-ordering of these ‘one use’ items and throwing out the spin that it’s dangerous to do anything but trash them and order a new one.

Unfortunately for them, and fortunately for the environment, the hospitals have shrinking budgets on their side. When there is an easy way for them to trim 40-60% off the cost of a line item they are going to pounce all over it.

The Wall Street Journal has it:

About $31.5 billion of single-use medical devices are sold annually in U.S. hospitals and surgery centers, of which around $150 million are recycled, according to Ascent Healthcare Solutions, a leading reprocessing company. John Grotting, Ascent’s chief executive, estimates that about $3.6 billion of single-use devices are safe for reprocessing, which could save the health-care industry about $1.8 billion a year. Ascent hospital customers eliminated about 1,684 tons of waste from their local landfills last year, a 31% increase over 2006, by using reprocessed devices, Ascent says.

Some people in the medical field think that some single use labeling is just a way for device manufacturers to pad their bottom line.

But hospital administrators and other experts say many products such as saw blades that were historically designated as reusable now carry single-use labels, with no obvious difference in the product.

“Single-use labeling is a real scam for a lot of devices, and by not using reprocessed devices where possible it is wasteful and not environmentally responsive, since these items have to be disposed of as biomedical waste,” says Kenneth Kizer, a consultant and former undersecretary for health at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. “The reuse of medical devices that are labeled for single-use only is a well-established and safe practice regulated by the FDA and utilized by most of the top-ranked hospitals in the country.”

Link [Wall Street Journal]