Clearing the way to healthy returns

Standing in the long, empty corridors of Booth Hall Children’s Hospital in Manchester is a bit unsettling. While in former days it would have been bustling with noise and activity, now it is eerily quiet. Old curtains are piled on the floor in front of peeling children’s murals. A computer screen sits propped against an ancient metal trolley. Out in the car park a team from Hilditch Group is quietly hard at work loading some final items from the hospital so that the demolition process can begin. While the process has an air of sadness, Booth Hall, along with four other hospitals in the city, includes a number of old buildings no longer in their prime. Instead of struggling on with an old building, the staff and patients have recently transferred to a bright new, state-of-the-art facility in Central Manchester. The Royal Manchester Children’s Hospital (HEJ – June and August 2009), the UK’s largest children’s hospital, with 371 beds, is resourced with all the latest equipment and technology. It therefore has no need for the worn trappings of the five decommissioned sites. So what happens to everything left behind in the move? Reuse or recycle? Before 1990, when Hilditch started offering a service, the company says there was little in the way of a secondary market for reuse of hospital equipment. With the introduction of the WEEE (Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment) legislation in 2007, proper disposal has become even more important. Now, legislation precludes hiring several hundred skips and throwing away perfectly re-useable items. By the time the WEEE legislation came into place, 70% of NHS Trusts were using Hilditch’s services, and by this year (the company claims) that figure had increased to 95%. Hilditch Group MD Mike Hilditch says: “In recent years NHS budgets have grown, with a mix of PFI and central funding. With hospitals instituting rolling replacement programmes, equipment is more frequently replaced. As a result the availability of high quality pre-used items has increased, and thus the secondary market has expanded.

WEEE ‘often misunderstood’

“The WEEE legislation is often misunderstood as a directive to encourage greater recycling, when in fact its real goal is to reduce waste,” he adds. “This is also reflected in HTM 07-01 – Safe Management of Health Care Waste. While in the past hospital managers paid to recycle surplus items, or returned them to manufacturers to refurbish and sell on, now there is an emphasis on reuse.” Hilditch says this has a number of advantages: