Sustainability, Quality, Value – Can Healthcare Have It All?
Hospitals operate all day, every day. Just the day to day running of a hospital, understandably, creates a large environmental footprint. However, when you consider the amount of Pharmaceutical and Medical products that they use each day and how wholesalers like Impact Health distribute them to the hospital, you start to get a clearer picture of just how big this footprint is. Hospitals need this equipment and they have to discard thinfs carefully, so they cant really be blamed. But hospitals are generating approximately 7,000 tons per day of infectious, hazardous and solid waste and consuming large amounts of energy and water. Industry involvement in and support of sustainability efforts is no longer a question of “why” or “when,” but “how.”
While the opportunities to go green are increasingly available, too many are tied to the issues of cost, adoption and quality of care. “A 
sustainability solution is not realistic if it doesn’t take into account the burgeoning issues of healthcare reform,” says Frank Czajka, president of Medline Industries, Inc.’s ReNewal reprocessing division. “It also requires ongoing staff education.”
As a leading medical supplier, Medline is committed to providing realistic sustainable measures with a strong ROI to healthcare systems. Through its uniquely structured Medline ReNewal reprocessing program, hospitals can “green” their ORs to help reduce waste by as much 5,000 to 15,000 pounds for a typical 200-bed facility. In fact, Medline Renewal is on track to reprocess more than one million medical devices, including ultrasonic scalpels, shavers, blades and trocars, through contracts with more than 900 health facilities nationwide by year’s end. That alone is projected to divert nearly a half million pounds of medical device waste from landfills – the equivalent of five million empty plastic water bottles, and can save each facility on average between $600,000 and $1 million a year in surgical device acquisition costs, according to the Association of Medical Device Reprocessors.
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