Medical help is what we all need and what we all depend on. Without it, our life expectancy would be much lower and we would be prone to both heavier and lighter illnesses and diseases.
As much as medicine is good it is also bad, but not in the way you think. Every industry, including medical one, produces some sort of waste that is bad for the environment. With medical development, we also had a huge spike in medical waste that was worse for us and the planet. We managed to make some implementation and do some sort of waste management to reduce that and to reduce the impact on our surroundings. This is why medical waste management is important and this is why we decided to make an article on it and to help you find out what are some of the simple ways you can improve medical waste management.
For clarification medical waste does not come just from healthcare meant for us, humans, you also have a lot of waste from animal med care and other similar branches. Without further ado, let’s talk about some of those simple ways to manage this issue better, and if you need additional assistance with this then Medwaste Management is the stop for you.
1. Make us a bit healthier
There is research that was done and that picked up some fame in media and government backing, that stated making us a little healthier and with a bit more care when we leave hospitals would make substantial savings to the medical branch as a whole and would significantly reduce medical waste that has to be made in the process of us getting better.
This research has some positive and negative effects and overall has been viewed as a weak solution, despite its fame, but it also gives us an insight into what to do besides this to manage medical waste better than we did so far. The goal of this way is to up the care toward patients that are more or less sick so they reach better health until they leave the hospital and prolong their stay out of the hospital. This will increase the cost a bit but should eventually reduce the medical waste made from person to person.
2. Identification of wasteful goods
Another thing that can make waste management a lot better is to know what types of goods in medical care are wasteful and try to replace those one times use items with those that can be reused multiple times, if possible and when possible. This approach is not that difficult but since medicine is specific with sterilisation and other things sometimes this is not possible. In some situations, you can use the same needle and syringe more than once but in some cases, you can reuse other things and make a significant reduction to waste created on a patient-to-patient basis.
3. Know your local laws
This seems to be something that is mandatory but you wouldn’t believe how many people do not know the laws regarding medical waste management, and all other waste management, before they start planning and managing it. this leads to plenty of misinformation, and money wasting that is not beneficial to our business and other things.
Your local law regulation will tell you what and how you need to do certain things and within those, you may find some helpful things that will tell you the way you can manage your medical waste. There are general rules and regulations but there are also guidelines for everyone, depending on the medical branch, the size of the business and what you do actually, so not every rule applies to all.
4. Medication adaptation
Elimination or replacing a drug, procedure or any sort of administrative process will in the grand scheme of things impact waste management by a mile. But this doesn’t mean that it will be easy and that it will easily adopt in all other hospitals or medical facilities. By doing so you will reduce both the hospital costs and the medical waste but it will also mean that all major healthcare providers will see a reduction in revenue as the waste management strategies become successful. These are the things that are neatly connected and one affects the other every time.
5. Cut waste but not quality
When making a viable and sustainable medical waste management plan you will inevitably have to cut down a lot of costs and adjust on both systemic and patient-to-patient levels. This might end up hurting your patients because they might get a lower quality treatment but cutting down on waste without lowering the healthcare quality is hard but not impossible.
Doing some fine-tuning and some calculations, with a lot of trial and error this is achievable, and the Camden study proved this, at least for a bit. The only thing that is questionable here is the patients’ experience. In a systemic approach to changes for the sake of better waste management the overall patient experience goes down but when you do a patient-to-patient approach, you will end up wasting more time and money, but the overall patient experience goes up, they will come back less frequently and you will end up with a viable medical waste management plan.
In conclusion, we need to say that, although the title of the article says 5 easy ways to improve your medical waste management, there is nothing that easy about it. It will take time, and it will take a toll on you, your medical business and all of your workers, but this is why you need to start planning this early on. By the time you develop this plan, you will have a fully operational business with greater patient experience, lower cost of operation after implementation and a greatly lower impact on our surroundings and our planet at least when the waste is considered.
So far plenty of big medical facilities and healthcare providers are trying to skate by doing little to nothing about this. There are some plans and some implementations but they reluctantly make bigger steps for the reasons we already mentioned. We hope that all of them will make a huge leap forward before it is too late.