An exclusive resource for Practitioners, Nurses, Managers, Clinical Specialists, Anaesthetics, Scrub, PACU, Training & Procurement ISSN 1747-728X <strong>The</strong> Leading Independent <strong>Journal</strong> For ALL <strong>Operating</strong> <strong>The</strong>atre Staff Discover more online! Join our FREE mailing list at www.otjonline.com and stay in touch with News and Reviews Queen’s Hospital to help boost health coffers - and here’s how It comes as Prime Minister <strong>The</strong>resa May has called for action on waste in the NHS Plastic used in Burton’s Queen’s Hospital’s operating theatres is now being recycled and can be sold on to boost health coffers. <strong>The</strong> Belvedere Road hospital has installed a recycling machine called a Sterimelt which turns clinical blue waste, used in operating theatres, into a product that can make money for the NHS. This technology is leading the way as Prime Minister <strong>The</strong>resa May sent out a call to action on waste reduction within the NHS. <strong>The</strong> Prime Minister said that a £20 billion spending boost to the National Health Service in the UK would be conditional on them cutting bureaucracy and waste. Mrs May, in a speech at the Royal Free Hospital in London, said: “This must be a plan that ensures every penny is well spent. “It must be a plan that tackles waste, reduces bureaucracy and eliminates unacceptable variation, with all these efficiency savings reinvested back into patient care. “It must be a plan that makes better use of capital investment to modernise its buildings and invest in technology to drive productivity improvements.” Burton Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, which runs Queen’s, started this process with the installation of a revolutionary recycling machine called a Sterimelt from multi-awardwinning Welsh company <strong>The</strong>rmal Compaction Group. <strong>The</strong> cutting-edge sustainable recycling technology has had interest from around the world and Burton is the first health service trust in England to have installed this technology. Clinical Sterilisation Wrap, the single use disposable plastic material which is used in operating theatre’s and for encasing sterile instruments, is normally mingled with hazardous material, then incinerated or sent to special landfill when finished with. This costs the NHS trust money to dispose of. However, the Sterimelt machine takes the blue Sterilisation Wrap and thermally densifies it into polypropylene blocks that the trust can then sell on to third party manufacturers which, in turn, can be made into anything from a tool box to a plastic hazard warning sign for water spillages. Recently, other single use disposable items have been identified for recycling in Sterimelt, such as blue polypropylene patient bed transfer sheets, adding more value to NHS sustainable recycling. Other than Burton, <strong>The</strong>rmal Compaction Group has received interest around England, particularly in the North East and South West, for the Sterimelt to be installed in other trusts, said a spokesman. Natalie Roddis, the waste and sustainability officer for Burton Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, said: “My colleague James Chadwick went to a convention where he saw it and spoke us about it. “We got in touch with <strong>The</strong>rmal Compaction Group and they were fantastic and very responsive. We all jumped into a car and drove to Wales to see it. We spoke to them [<strong>The</strong>rmal Compaction Group] and the current Welsh NHS user about it and it was just as good as we thought. “It came at the right time when Blue Planet was on the TV highlighting plastics (pollution) in the sea. “We had it installed in March and we have not had any problems at all. To get our uncontaminated clinical waste recycled, it is fantastic.” <strong>The</strong> machine has already created interest from other trusts who have been to Queen’s Hospital to see it in action. And Natalie said it is “exciting” to be the first trust in England to install one of the revolutionary Sterimelt machines. She said: “Because it is only the second commercial Sterimelt to be built by <strong>The</strong>rmal Compaction Group, there are a couple of tweaks but the contact we have with the <strong>The</strong>rmal Compaction Group team means we just tell them about anything and within a day or two, they are here from Wales to help us. “We have had a lot of interest already from other trusts to come and look at it.” <strong>The</strong>rmal Compaction Group has won the Cardiff Business Awards Innovation award for the Sterimelt, beating three other major companies to the prestigious trophy. It also won the Welsh Business Awards ‘Success Thorough Innovation’ category just three months after final trials on the Sterimelt and full implementation of the product were completed at the Aneurin Bevan University Health Board in South East Wales. <strong>The</strong>rmal Compaction Group’s sales and marketing director Thomas Davison-Sebry said: “It is fantastic to be working with a great team of people like those at Burton Hospital NHS Foundation Trust. “As a private company, at first, we were unsure how it was going to go with working with public bodies because this was new to us but it is incredible. “We have come up against small issues but we have worked together as a team, accomplished and addressed all these and come up with a fully commercialised machine. “We have been speaking to people across Asia, Australia, North America and just recently signed a distributor in South Africa who are also enthusiastic about the Sterimelt machine and can see the potential this possesses to deliver revenue from waste that would otherwise be incinerated.” Source: Derbyshire Live (Jenny Moody) 6 THE OPERATING THEATRE JOURNAL www.otjonline.com