doing use evaluations, Wenzel says. “If we hadn’t used a certain product in the last year, we evaluated its use,” he says. “We cut our stock by over 30 percent in suture that would just sit on the shelf and expire. We also determined that we didn’t need four different sizes of tonsil sponges, so we eliminated three sizes and kept one standard size. The same happened with many ENT supplies, be- cause they were more specialized and, thus, cost more. Keeping our shelves stocked with supplies that we weren’t using was eating a ton of money, espe- cially, when the product would just ex- pire from lack of use anyway.” Use evaluation reduced the par-level for infrequently used items, as well, Wenzel says. “If we only average three uses per quarter, then we would reduce the par to three from eight.” The center started to re-process single-use devices. “Laparoscopic and staplers would go for reprocessing to a company, and the company would deter- mine if they could be reprocessed or, if not, recycled,” Wenzel says. “So we paid a lot less in trash hauling, and the pro- cess pulled a lot of trash out of the waste stream. We reduced our sterile supplies by 30 percent for 2012 at the ASC.” Recycling paper and plastics was an- other huge step toward the same goal of reducing waste. “We’d put paper in the shredder bin but now we’re putting it in the recycling bin and paying less,” Wen- zel says. “Plastic is used a lot in surger- ies. There is hard plastic and blue wrap. We partnered with our waste hauler. They donated a small cardboard baler to us, and we started saving all the blue wraps. Every other week we would pro- duce 800 pounds of blue wrap. In 2011, we produced over 18,000 pounds of blue wrap, which is turned into railroad ties and rubber mulch for playgrounds. The waste hauler found somebody who would take the blue wrap. For the hard plastic, we would have a container, and all the hard plastic—cases and bowls— would go in there.”
The ASC follows routine waste management and recycling
proce-
In time, Beltway Surgery Center in Indianapolis, the sister surgery cen- ter of Senate Street Surgery Center, also joined the initiative and started recycling.
Senate Street Surgery Center signed on as a partner with Practice Green- health of Reston, Virginia, (see sidebar on page 14) in 2010.
dures and sources out polyvinyl chlo- ride (PVC)-free and diethylhexyl phthalate (DEHP)-free IV bags and tubing,” Koos says. “We’ve standard- ized our instrument kits for different procedures so that we can utilize the same kit for different surgeons and not use multiple kits. We also use instru- ment cassettes that house them, and in doing so, we don’t have single break- down cassettes that are discarded. The wraps that we use to put them in an autoclave are re-usable. So we’ve re- duced our waste by 25 percent com- pared to conventional standards.” The surgery center uses an onsite biohazard waste processor, and there-
It’s our corporate social responsibility to do things the right way for our patients and the surrounding community.”
—Steve Koos, MD, ORA Oral Surgery & Implant Studio
Like Senate Street Surgery Center, ORA Oral Surgery & Implant Studio in Chicago, also a member of Prac- tice Greenhealth, moved a lot of waste from the trash stream by implementing green practices. Every year, the surgery center di-
verts about 7,500 pounds of refuse from the landfill, says Steve Koos, MD, owner of ORA Oral Surgery & Im- plant Studio. “We utilize a paperless digital charting system and re-usable clinical textiles, rather than disposable textiles, and we divert 55,650 pieces of paper from the landfill yearly. We use autoclavable alternatives to single-use plastic items for patients, and based on the 5,000–6,000 patients that we see a year, we divert about 255,000 pieces of non-degradable plastic from the landfill every year. We also divert about 44 per- cent of our total solid waste from land- fill to recyclable streams with re-use.”
fore, doesn’t generate any biohazard waste. “There’s a unit, called the De- molizer II, that takes red bag waste and sharps and processes those, pul- verizes them and renders them non- contaminating and non-bio-hazardous, and then the product of this process is safe to be discarded as regular waste,” Koos explains. “Sharps Compliance is the company that we’re working with to process our scalpels, needles, etc. It’s a nice medical waste management sys- tem, and it repurposes needles, syring- es, scalpel blades and more to a prod- uct called Pella-DRX, which is used in roads and bridges, etc., and represents a system that diverts 100 percent of mate- rial from entering landfills. “We also recycle our surgical in-
struments,” Koos adds. “There’s a life span to them and we wanted to make sure that they are repurposed, as well. Hu-Friedy is the company we work with, and they handle the processing
ASC FOCUS APRIL 2013 13
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38