Sustainability
Sustainable progress on textiles for theatres
Kate Woodhead RGN DMS says we have a moral duty to reduce our carbon footprint. The Green Surgery Report by the Royal Colleges has set out the pathway for healthcare, but there are many ways in which we can ensure a circular economy. In this article, she discusses some of the ways this can be achieved.
We all know that, since the announcement by the National Health Service in 2020, that it is the ambition of the service to achieve Net Zero emissions by 2045. It is reported that the NHS generates between 4% and 5% of the country’s greenhouse gases and one quarter of all public sector waste. The main contributors of the carbon footprint have been identified as energy use, which accounts for over half of healthcare’s footprint and includes on-site consumption by heating, ventilation and environmental control systems, as well as that used by suppliers in the provision of goods and services. The remainder of the footprint is allocated to the healthcare supply chain through production, transport and disposal of goods and services – particularly food and hospital equipment, surgical instruments, chemicals and medical devices. Therein lies a responsibility on procurement
and clinical staff to take note of and try to avoid high emission products, so that we can make progress towards reducing global greenhouse gas emissions and Net Zero. Determining the life cycle of different elements of an environment,
function or treatment undertaken in the healthcare sector is an enormous undertaking. However, a life cycle assessment of individual parts of a service is possible and can be quite enlightening. Reducing the carbon footprint of products used in the operating theatres will play a huge role in the transition to sustainable models of surgical care.1
Surgery uses a large variety of
products and medical devices, many of which are single use and disposed of directly after use, such as gloves, drapes, gowns, tubing and many medical devices – some simple, others complex. This creates a great deal of waste and is rarely reviewed by each procedure. Product reuse, if available, ought to be prioritised, so as to get maximum safe use from each product used. It is important that cultural awareness in the NHS is raised so that theatre departments can contribute meaningfully to carbon reduction. Not in this country, but in some developed countries, it is acceptable practice to re-use single use devices and an industry has grown up around this service particularly in the US.
Gowns and drapes Surgical gowns and drapes were initially made from cotton and were reusable. As surgical site infections increased during the 1980s and 1990s more and more disposable drapes and gowns were made available to the NHS and there was much pressure to switch over to more ‘microbially suitable products’. Of course, it had little direct impact on the prevalence of surgical site infections but remains one of the myths which needs to be reviewed. Both the CDC2
and NICE3
have identified that there is little
difference between the two with regards to infection. One of the solutions which particularly appeals to this author, and is worthy of serious consideration by procurement teams and theatre management, is that of serviced provision of sterile theatre gowns and drapes. Immediate advantages of the system are that all of the product belongs to the company, who remove the contaminated items from the hospital site, renew it via a dedicated surgical processing facility, where gowns and drapes are processed, dried, folded, packed and sterilised back to the theatre. All the risk is taken away from the hospital (and therefore the patient) and into the bargain, the hospitals’ waste volume reduces significantly. Identifying the different aspects of this set-up is worth looking at in detail.
Proven performance The information required by theatre management, surgical teams and procurement is that the items being purchased will do the patient no harm and, in fact, are superior in performance to those that are being superseded. A study undertaken on reusable hospital gowns, both high protection and standard protection gowns was undertaken by The University of Sheffield and the Grantham Centre for Sustainable Futures in 2022.4
The study set out to identify a life December 2024 I
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