Today, we visited Bristol Royal Infirmary, one of RecoMed’s newer recruits and the most recent NHS Trust to declare a Climate Emergency in October 2019.
Since starting to collect masks and tubing in August ’19 they have had two collections, totalling 177Kg. It was time for a follow up visit to see how things were going from the clinician’s and waste manager’s perspectives.
Dr Amelia Pickard is a consultant anaesthetist at BRI and leads on implementing sustainability initiatives in her department, particularly stockpiling single use paper coffee cups for recycling through their local Costa! She has been instrumental in introducing RecoMed to her colleagues and has had a great deal of interest and buy in to the scheme. We met with Amelia and Joe Duarte (Portering, Distribution and Waste Manager) along with Thijs Mostert, a post grad from Plymouth University looking into reducing waste in the healthcare sector.
We took a tour of the RecoMed bins in the Children’s Hospital, adjacent to the main Royal Infirmary to begin with. They have a total of 9 bins on site, spread between the main hospital, the Children’s Hospital and the Eye Hospital. These visits are usually a great opportunity to really engage with the clinical staff to see how they are getting on segregating the PVC masks and tubing from the other clinical waste, and also to assess how well they are doing ensuring that the strapping and other non-PVC components of items are removed before placing the item in the bin. However, on this occasion we were really pleasantly surprised to find not one instance of contamination in any of the bins. Here’s a picture as evidence….
We’re really pleased with how the scheme has started here at Bristol Royal and so are the staff as they have just requested another 25 pedal bins!