Reducing the Environmental Impact of Syringes at the Intensive Care Unit

Reducing the Environmental Impact of Syringes at the Intensive Care Unit

Honkoop, Margot (Student TU Delft)
Albayrak, A. (TU Delft Applied Ergonomics and Design)
Balkenende, R. (TU Delft Circular Product Design)
Hunfeld, Nicole (Erasmus MC)
Diehl, J.C. (Erasmus MC)

Melles, M. (editor)
Goossens, R.H. (editor)

2024

This research project, part of the Green Intensive Care Unit (ICU) initiative at the Erasmus University Medical Center (EMC), is focused on reducing the environmental impact of syringes at the ICU by designing solutions based on circular economy principles. Based on a Material Flow Analysis of the EMC ICU, syringes and their packaging have been identified as one of the main environmental impact hotspots. Therefore, this project aimed to redesign the syringes, their packaging, and their use, according to circular design strategies suitable for medical products to decrease their environmental impact, while remaining convenient and safe in use for the healthcare staff and patients. Research was executed to understand the context from multiple perspectives. The outcomes demonstrated that decreasing the impact of syringes is not only related to the design of the syringe itself. Manufacturing, preparation, use and disposal, all contribute to the environmental impact of the syringe. Various possible interventions were derived to reduce its impact:

1.
Adapting the infection prevention protocol and behaviour of the staff;

2.
Separating infectious waste from general hospital waste;

3.
Redesigning the syringe itself;

4.
Optimising the filling process of syringes.

The final design is an optimised filling process for prefilled sterilised syringes (PFSs), based on circular strategies such as reduce, reuse, rethink and repurpose. Interventions include: eliminating a redundant sterilisation phase, reducing residual medication and changing from steam to gamma sterilisation. This resulted in decreasing the amount of waste, material, energy and water consumption, while offering similar convenience and safety for the staff and patients of the ICU.

Circular healthcare
Syringe
Environmental impact
Design

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:2d70b0c5-78c4-46bf-b66e-19d00f3a5458

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32198-6_21

Springer, Cham

2024-05-05

978-3-031-32197-9

Springer Series in Design and Innovation: Proceedings of the International Conference on Healthcare Systems Ergonomics and Patient Safety, HEPS2022

HEPS2022, 2023-11-02 → 2023-11-04, Delft, Netherlands

Springer Series in Design and Innovation, 2661-8184, 30

Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository 'You share, we take care!' - Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.

Institutional Repository

conference paper

© 2024 Margot Honkoop, A. Albayrak, R. Balkenende, Nicole Hunfeld, J.C. Diehl