Reducing the environmental impact of medical devices adopted for use in the NHS

In this paper we explore challenges and opportunities for integrating environmental impact considerations into key decisions and processes for medical devices in their journey from regulatory approval to adoption in England’s National Health Service (NHS).

We outline a journey map for medical devices from approval for the UK market to adoption, identifying key stakeholders (including regulatory, commissioning, procurement and adoption stakeholder groups), and stages and processes along that route. We fnd large variation in the product (and performance) considerations that stakeholders prioritise, and in the approach to identifying and tackling environmental impact targets or criteria. We fnd many existing and emerging initiatives across the healthcare ecosystem that demonstrate appetite and momentum for improved environmental performance, although such initiatives are disjointed and tend to focus either at supplier level, or only on pharmaceuticals. We fnd absence of a widely accepted or standardised methodology for evaluation of environmental impact specifc to medical devices, making comparison between products challenging and unreliable.

We analyse existing academic literature to identify environmental impact hotspots of medical devices and approaches to improving resource effciency of medical devices. A substantial area of focus has been on considering reusable versus single-use medical devices, identifying that reusable products deliver average carbon savings of 38-56% across the product life cycle,1 and may offer cost savings through more effcient resource use. We identify the contributing processes to the environmental impact of both single-use and reusable medical devices, and approaches to reduce environmental impact of those processes.