Identify which services are affected by your sustainability initiative, and brainstorm ways that the initiative will improve patient care and outcomes.

Running head: SUSTAINABILITY INITIATIVE 1

SUSTAINABILITY INITIATIVE 5

Sustainability Initiative; Local Hospital

Debra Saunders

MHA/560

12/09/2019

Doria Chege

Sustainability Initiative; Local Hospital

Sustainability initiatives are an essential part of an organization in managing expenditure in terms of reducing the costs of services and equipment used. The initiatives help reduce the costs, get rid of wastes, and improve the quality of patient care in the particular organization. The local healthcare hospital is made up of departments that include the human resource management department, the laboratory department, the finance department, the ICT department, the wards, labor and delivery, the emergency departments, and the ICU department. The roles of employees in the local hospital basically involve patient care by the healthcare professionals and maintaining a sufficient environment for patient care by other hospital workers in charge of security and sanitation. Activities that are operational in a local hospital include administering medication, surgical procedures, counseling services, laboratory testing, and blood transfusion, among other procedures. The sustainable initiative that I aim to promote in this paper, which is suitable for a local hospital, is the device reprocessing initiative. The sources I need to collect and analyze data for my initiative include the hospital management department for the allocation of funds towards the purchase of medical equipment. The Food and Drug Administration also has to approve of the initiative before the hospital puts it to work.

The device reprocessing initiative is aimed at ensuring that money is saved by the organization and invested for use in other essential initiatives that the hospital may need to undertake. At the same time, it ensures that the quality of care provided to the patients is not negatively affected by the enforcement of the particular initiative. The initiative involves making use of reusable devices to reduce the regular buying of new devices, which could be costly for the hospital (Petersen, 2019). Reprocessing, therefore, involves cleaning, disinfecting,

remanufacturing, sterilizing, testing, packaging, and labeling of medical devices that had already been used and putting them in use again. Instead of buying new devices for every similar procedure, the devices get carefully reprocessed, the process is to ensure that the devices are safe for patients and do not pose any health risks, reducing the cost of having to make fresh purchases.

There are several outcomes I expect to achieve from the initiative over time. These outcomes are based on costs, patient outcomes, and waste management. By reusing medical devices like those in the laboratories, it will be easier to manage waste as there will not be the disposal of non-biodegradable devices to the environment. For example, devices made of aluminum, stainless steel, gold, titanium, and polycarbonate can be sterilized and reused instead of getting dumped in landfills (Costa et al., 2019). The composition of waste that is nonbiodegradable will only cause harm to the surroundings. For this reason, reprocessing makes it possible for the same equipment to be used for a long time, minimizing waste and protecting the environment. Another outcome I aim to achieve is a significant reduction in the cost of funds used in purchasing medical devices. When this happens, the extra funds are put towards achieving other initiatives that are essential in running the hospital. Also, I aim to ensure that the reprocessing does not have a negative impact on the patients and that the hospital maintains positive patient outcomes.

Over time, I will ensure that the hospital achieves sustainability in all aspects by using the outcome of the device reprocessing initiative to influence the development of more sustainable initiatives. It will also achieve a nationwide sensitization in which hospitals across the country will adopt the reprocessing method and save millions of dollars per year (De Sousa et al., 2018). Reprocessing of medical devices is most prevalent in hospitals that have less access to resources, especially in terms of financial resources and channels for distribution. This is common in Africa and the Middle East, where reprocessing gets done at the level of user facility. Other regions like Canada, Asia, Israel, Australia, and British Columbia, among others, also encourage the reprocessing of medical devices. It is clear that reprocessing helps save costs.

References

Costa, F. S., Pereira, M. O., Esteves, C., & Carvalho, J. (2019, February). Reprocessing of Single-Use Medical Devices in the hospital environment: evolution and future perspectives. In 2019 IEEE 6th Portuguese Meeting on Bioengineering (ENBENG) (pp. 1-4). IEEE.

De Sousa Martins, B., Queiroz, J., Monteiro, J. L., Rente, G., & Bastos, P. T. (2018). Reprocessing of Single-Use Medical Devices: Clinical and Financial Results. Portuguese Journal of Public Health, 36(3), 131-137.

Petersen, N. (2019). An Analysis of the Economic, Environmental, and Ethical Benefits of Reprocessing Single-Use Medical Devices.