3 Ways to Manage Medical Waste Sustainability

As an office manager overseeing the operations of an outpatient practice, you’re aware of the high volume of waste that medical offices produce throughout the business week. These days, in the state of our global environmental climate, it’s vital to prioritize sustainability in healthcare. Did you know the healthcare industry is one of the planet’s largest producers of single-use waste?

Fostering medical waste sustainability is a proactive way to reduce environmental harm. One way to accomplish this is by considering a medical linen provider that can assist your outpatient office with sustainable practices, such as offering reusable linens. Learn more about reusable textiles and other practical solutions for hospital sustainability that your organization can implement right away.

1. Switch to Reusable Linens

Switching from disposable paper products to reusable linen products is a simple and effective way to support medical waste sustainability. Using single-use medical apparel and linens is detrimental to the environment and costly. Advanced organizations take advantage of reusable textiles.

With reusable medical textiles, your office won’t have to sacrifice protection or performance. Washable medical linens are essential to safe and effective care, reducing the spread of microorganisms and bodily fluids. When deciding between disposable or reusable medical apparel, performance and protection must be among the essential criteria you consider.

Decreasing your office’s carbon footprint has proven to lead to 28% less energy consumption, a 30% reduction in greenhouse gases, a 41% reduction in water consumption, and a 93% reduction in waste. Making your office more sustainable through medical linens helps reduce waste output and leads to a healthier environment. An added benefit for day-to-day operations is that your office is more organized and will spend less time on inventory and stocking.

Nixon Medical offers rental medical linens that are washable and reusable—an environmentally and financially friendly option. Some other benefits of reusing medical gowns, linens, and other textiles include maintaining a base level of PPE during conventional and crisis capacity times, improving patient and staff satisfaction, enhancing environmental quality, reducing waste, and controlling costs.

2. Adopt Greener Alternatives for Energy and Operations

There are many easy-to-implement ways to improve your facility’s sustainability by optimizing energy efficiency. These energy-focused renovations include updating your electrical, heating, and cooling systems to more eco-friendly alternatives. Lighting, water heating, and space heating account for more than 65% of the energy consumption. Healthcare facilities can tackle a considerable portion of waste by re-designing their buildings to become more efficient. Some additional eco-friendly re-design ideas include harvesting rainwater from the roof and using it to irrigate the landscaping. Collected rainwater can be used to operate cooling towers for an air conditioning system. Other green design initiatives could be installing high-efficiency windows, super-insulated roofs, and motion light sensors. Invest in solar solutions or work toward becoming certified for green-building-operating practices. Improving hospital sustainability for your outpatient center will have multiple long-lasting benefits, financial and otherwise.

Green alternatives can save money and time for your day-to-day operations, such as administrative work, procedures, and reporting. Switching to digital operations for scheduling, facilitating processes, and charting is a great way to reduce paper use and work more efficiently. An example of advancing hospital sustainability standards via implementing tech for specific operations would be swapping out analog x-ray systems for more advanced, digital ones. Digital systems for x-ray results eliminate the use of hazardous chemicals such as developers, fixers, and the film itself.

3. Streamline Management Practices

Making your office run smoothly is always a top priority, and you can opt to make it up to par with sustainable hospital standards. Better records keeping and streamlined processes can prevent wasting paper, running redundant tests, and saving on the medical waste generated throughout the day due to a lack of organization.

Instead of using your administrative time to log inventory on paper, for example, leverage intelligent inventory management solutions. Nixon Medical offers digital inventory management solutions that will lower your carbon footprint and increase operational efficiencies.

Sustainable Hospitals Are the Future

The time to act on sustainability practices is now. Do your part and make your medical practice a model for sustainability in healthcare. Nixon Medical makes switching vendors a seamless process that will make your healthcare practice operate at peak performance, leaving patients satisfied and maximizing your output. Nixon Medical has everything you need and more to become more sustainable. It is one of many reasons our satisfaction score is 50% higher than other vendors. Learn more about how Nixon Medical has supported outpatient offices in their healthcare sustainability efforts.

Start Becoming Sustainable Today

Nixon Medical is committed to helping outpatient offices achieve hospital sustainability. We want to ensure we protect the environment and offer medical practices everything they need to succeed.

Our team works with over 10,000 medical centers, providing fully managed HLAC-accredited medical laundry services, product fulfillment, and inventory management services. When you choose us, you’re choosing peace of mind, sustainable practices, and a service you can rely on. If you’re interested in learning more about how to make your medical practice more sustainable, please contact us.