There is a debate on the world of Health care logistics and recycling. We all know that our planet needs our help. We can’t really deny the impact and damage that we as humans have caused to our planet. The words global warming appears every day in the news.
As part of the effort to help reducing the amount of damage we do to the planet we have started a global campaign of recycling. Eco friendly practices have become part of our global obligations and little by little they are also starting to be part of our legal obligations thanks to our authorities.
The debate is whether in health care we should also recycle or not. For some people the answer is very straight forwards. Our health is more important and we can’t really tolerate getting contagion because of recycling purpose. When we go to a hospital we demand everything to be brand new and disposable. We don’t want to be in touch with anything that has been touched by someone who is ill because it can be contagious.
For some other people the damage that we have caused to our planet is so big that we can’t really afford not recycling everything that we can when it comes to hospital material and Health care logistics.
There is an initial approach that states that not everything in a hospital is in touch with ill people. For example plastic packaging where all the utensils come is never touched by patients. According to this approach all that material could be put together and taken to recycling. Of course this would require very complex processes in order to get all that material isolated from the rest of the contaminated material. This would require hospitals to implement new procedures and perhaps invest money. Unfortunately not all the hospitals are willing to do that and not all authorities considered this subject of vital importance.
There are a few pilots running in some hospitals with excellent results. With time it is expected that this procedures will acquire validity and authorities will modify procedures to include them as part of their daily routine.
There is also another approach that will actually deal with the infected material. This process consists on taking the material to a disinfection plant first and then later taken for recycling. This new method is still new and being tested so there isn’t much documentation about it and the authorities are hardly going to put it into practice since they haven’t done that with the simplest approach yet. We are still giving the first steps towards complete recycling in the health sector. But the most important thing is that at least we have started.
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