New Hanover Regional Medical Centre
The first two years showed a reduction of over 50 tons of sharps from going into landfills. This is a great program and a true partnership.
Richard McCormick, EVS DirectorThe Challenge
To become a more sustainable hospital system while not comprising on safety, value and interruption of patient care. Also help Environmental Services reduce labour.
Our Approach
STEP 1
We met with Material Management, EVS, Clinical Care Administration, and Facilities Management to explain who Sharpsmart is and what we can provide NHRMC. Here we showed our sharps container and went over the DCS. We were given a copy of the current purchase volume of disposable sharps containers.
STEP 2
Thereafter, we conducted a walk of the hospital to understand their layout and current challenges with current program. Met with nurse managers on the floors to show the Sharpsmart Container. Discovered they were using 5.6 qts sharps in all the rooms and between 45%-66% of clinical waste coming off the floors were sharps waste. This led to EVS having to constantly running bags of infectious waste from floors to the dock.
STEP 3
The Sharpsmart team returned to meet with the NHRMC administration team to discuss what we saw on the ward walk and presented a proposal along with suggested plastic reductions by going to reusable sharps containers. Also showed them how this would reduce the amount of time EVS would have to pull red bags and that the Sharpsmart S22 had a 4x fill rate capacity to their current sharps container.
The Solution
The Sharpsmart team installed Sharpsmart reusable sharps containers throughout the hospital. 18 months later we installed our reusable cytotoxic sharps containers in their new Cancer Centre.
The Outcome
This October will be our 2 year anniversary with NHRMC. Currently they have reduced over 50 tons of sharps container waste from landfill, while also cutting their biomedical waste by over 53%. They have seen a huge reduction in labour alone just by switching to our 64 Litre Cytotoxic container. Before EVS would have to pull the bag, put a box together, place it in the box, close the box and place it in the cooler,(this would take up to 5 mins.) Now they just secure the Sharpsmart cytotoxic container and place it in the transporter, (under a min.)
Sharpsmart has been very instrumental in moving NHRMC in the reduction of waste that was being placed in landfills to becoming more aware of the ability to be a “Green” Hospital. The first two years showed a reduction of over 50 tons of sharps from going into landfills. The efficiency of their program has helped the staff tremendously as well. This is a great program and a true partnership.
Richard McCormick, EVS Director