How hospitals and other healthcare facilities can cost-effectively and efficiently deal with the sizeable quantities of clinical and other waste generated by their day-today activities, while meeting their statutory obligations, and keeping “on the right side” of regulatory and enforcement bodies such as the Environment Agency,
was the subject of a recent IHEEM seminar, “Safe management of healthcare waste”, in London. HEJ editor Jonathan Baillie reports.
The seminar, held at an especially appropriate juncture given the (at the time; it was, in fact published last month) impending publication of a revised version of the Department of Health’s HTM 07-01 Health Technical Memorandum offering guidance on waste management, handling, and disposal, was chaired by Lorraine Holme, sustainable development programme manager at the Department of Health. Before introducing the first speaker, Anne Harrison, a barrister at Beachcroft LLP, she issued a salutary warning: that all in healthcare with responsibility for waste should be continuing to seek ways to reduce the amount generated, in line with today’s “sustainability agenda”. She said: “Excessive clinical and other hospital waste in no way meets the criteria of social responsibility or economic prudency, let alone good environmental practice; nor does it meet the current carbon agenda. In addition, the QIPP (Quality, Innovation, Productivity and Prevention) agenda emphasises the importance of prevention in all guises, including of unnecessary waste.” Given waste’s potential negative impact on the environment and human health, Lorraine Holme went on to argue that designers and manufacturers of products that would end up as waste needed to consider what would happen to them at their end-of-life “as a key resource issue at the outset”, rather than considering their safe and effective disposal only once they were no longer of practical use. In addition to the moral and practical obligations to minimise waste and safely dispose of it in an environmentally acceptable way, the seminar chair told delegates that, with the Climate Change Act establishing a legal requirement for all public bodies to report on their carbon impacts, which will include those derived from waste handling and disposal activities in the future, and with the wider NHS carbon reduction agenda gaining an ever higher profile, the regulatory pressures to deal responsibly with healthcare waste were also mounting.
Transparency and accountability
Log in or register FREE to read the rest
This story is Premium Content and is only available to registered users. Please log in at the top of the page to view the full text.
If you don't already have an account, please register with us completely free of charge.
