SUSTAINABILITY IN THE NHS
The ongoing quest to make PPE more ‘sustainable’
Speaking at the Central Sterilising Club’s Annual Study Day last October, Paul Chivers, who heads up the PPE Innovation and Sustainability Team for NHS Supply Chain, explained some of the key initiatives his team has taken since its establishment in the pandemic’s early days to encourage development of more reusable PPE, and improve the sustainability and efficacy of such products already in use. Some of the developments, he explained, not only have the potential to substantially reduce the NHS’s procurement and waste disposal costs, but also to significantly cut carbon emissions.
Paul Chivers was introduced to delegates at the CSC Annual Study Day on 10 October last year by the Club’s Media Coordinator, Becky Hill, who in her professional role is Water Services Solutions manager for Healthcare at Veolia Water Technologies. She explained that with an engineering background, and extensive programme and project management experience, the speaker would be using his session, titled, ‘Innovation and sustainability in PPE decontamination’, to discuss how he and his team have successfully identified a reusable Type IIR mask, which has been piloted in line with NHS England’s National Infection Prevention and Control Manual for England, to support reusable mask safety. He had also – Becky Hill explained – been liaising closely with regulators to discuss standards and specifications for reprocessing PPE and some medical devices. Paul Chivers began: “So, as Becky said, I head up the PPE Innovation and Sustainability Team within NHS Supply Chain.
Where to go for guidance? “If you have a product or a novel idea, or want to manufacture something new in the way of, say, a reusable mask, and don’t know whether it’s PPE, or a medical device,” Paul Chivers continued, “you don’t really have anywhere to go to get that advice and guidance. For example, the Health & Safety Executive won’t give you it – because they regulate you, and if they give you the guidance, then they’re likely to be policing themselves should anything go wrong.” Similarly, Paul Chivers said, the Department of Health & Social Care’s PPE Strategy in the Autumn of 2020 had indicated that there would be more onshore and nearshore production, more resilience, and more reusable products than had in fact transpired. He explained: “The backdrop to all this is the NHS’s Net Zero drive, and in 2023 we will be just five
Paul Chivers, who heads up the PPE Innovation and Sustainability Team for NHS Supply Chain.
years away from the start of the service’s four-year target period of reducing its direct emissions by 80%. There is thus a lot to do.”
Reduction in glove usage When the PPE Innovation and Sustainability Team was founded, Paul Chivers explained, it had seven members, but it now has just two. Moving to discuss what the team had achieved during its short time in existence, the speaker began with the so-called Glove MOOC, or ‘massive open online course’, which he explained was a one-hour education information package, based largely on what Great Ormond Street Hospital achieved in 2018, when staff there managed to reduce examination glove usage by 33%. He said: “33% of our glove usage across health and social care
– currently six billion a year – is quite a sizable difference; a lot of carbon, waste, and procurement costs.” Having been launched in August 2021, the glove-related MOOC was now ‘live’, and available to everybody in health and social care and the independent sector. He said: “It’s currently being used by people in Australia and Hungary as well. To date over 1000 people have signed up to it, and we are continuing to promote it.”
Driving learning via an interactive tool The goal of the Glove MOOC is to try to drive organisations to use the learning from what is quite an ‘interactive’ tool. Pointing to a slide (see Table 1), Paul Chivers said PPE demand data from early October 2022 showed that just a 15% reduction in the use of the examination
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