The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) has published a new strategy that is designed to radically cut the number of single-use medical devices in the NHS.
Disposable medical devices substantially contribute to the 156,000 tonnes of clinical waste that the NHS produces every year in England alone. DHSC says this major crackdown on waste in the NHS will save millions of pounds a year.
The new strategy, ‘Design for Life Roadmap’, means that BHTA members that manufacture medical devices should focus on producing sustainable products, as the NHS is slashing waste and prioritising reuse, remanufacturing, and recycling.
Doing so will create thousands more UK jobs and help transform the country into a life sciences superpower, according to the UK Government. As it stands, millions of devices, like walking aids and surgical instruments, are thrown away after just one use.
The government will encourage more innovation to safely remanufacture a wider range of products and drive costs down, including by changing procurement rules to incentivise reusable products and rolling out examples where hospitals are already leading the way on cutting wasteful spending and practices.
Approximately £10 billion each year is spent on medical technology like this in the NHS, but too much of it is imported via vulnerable routes that risk disrupting patient care, the government states.
Health and Social Care Secretary Wes Streeting said: “The NHS is broken. It is the mission of this government to get it back on its feet, and we can’t afford a single penny going to waste.
“Because the NHS deals in the billions, too often it doesn’t think about the millions. That has to change. This government inherited a £22 billion blackhole in the public finances, so we will have a laser-like focus on getting better value for taxpayers’ money.
“Every year, millions of expensive medical devices are chucked in the bin after being used just once. We are going to work closely with our medical technology industry, to eliminate waste and support homegrown medtech and equipment.”
In one case study, Mid Yorkshire Trust uses 330,000 single-use tourniquets in a year, but a single reusable tourniquet can be used 10,000 times. In a one-year trial, reusable alternatives saved £20,000 in procurement costs and 0.75 metric tonnes of plastic waste.
The Design for Life programme will reduce this kind of waste and achieve an NHS-wide move to sustainable alternatives, also supporting the government’s net zero goals. The new roadmap sets out 30 actions to achieve this shift, including how the government will work with companies to encourage the production of more sustainable products, along with training for NHS staff on how to use them.
Taking this approach will mean more money can be spent in the UK, DHSC underlines, driving growth and creating more engineering, life sciences, and research jobs, while securing savings for the NHS budget.
Many of these products include precious metals such as platinum and titanium, which are in high demand but go to landfill when they could be recovered and sold. A reduction in the amount of disposed single-use devices will also reduce the country’s carbon footprint and plastic pollution.
The government will encourage industry figures to innovate by making sure benefits of reusable medtech are part of how the NHS chooses the products it buys.
The Design for Life programme was developed with more than 80 stakeholders from the UK medtech industry, the health and care system, and research organisations.