Stericycle Inc.

08/12/2024 | News release | Distributed by Public on 08/12/2024 09:54

Understanding the Key Challenges of Healthcare Waste and Overcoming Them

August 12, 2024

Understanding the Key Challenges of Healthcare Waste and Overcoming Them

Based on our decades servicing healthcare providers we have witnessed their difficulties navigating and meeting regulatory and other waste requirements due to a lack of resources, incorrect stakeholder engagement, and ineffective communication. Today, those challenges are compounded by landfill and incinerator capacity concerns, increased regulatory scrutiny, and waste outlet options. Failure to include all appropriate stakeholders will leave gaps in your programs and planning, especially when considering all impacts along the lifecycle of waste.

Let us consider an example of regulated medical waste programs. If your organization sets up a program without engaging nursing/healthcare practitioners for feedback, it may not be designed to support the workflow needs of the staff and could lead to waste segregation issues. Improperly classifying and sorting waste may result in fines, violation notices, and rejected loads, which can disrupt a waste program and tarnish an organization's reputation.

Particularly with the increase in the challenges stated above, it is important to have a clear objective, engagement of all appropriate internal and external key stakeholders, and take into consideration the entire lifecycle of waste. These focus areas will help your organization more effectively navigate all requirements, understand needed resources, and implement clear and specific communication to support an impactful action plan and strategy.

How Stakeholder Engagement Supports Proper Waste Management

Engaging the right stakeholders is foundational to the success of any waste management program, as it significantly influences the availability of resources and the effectiveness of communications. Stakeholders can be categorized into two main groups:

  • Frontline stakeholders are those who have day-to-day responsibilities to support program outcomes.
  • Compliance stakeholders are the leaders with responsibilities, including program decisions, policy determination, and purchasing decisions.

For example, frontline stakeholders might be those administering care and working with patients. Compliance stakeholders lead departments and design and implement policies to ensure clinicians and support services know how to handle regulated waste properly. These groups must work in tandem to ensure frontline needs are considered in policy and program design. At the same time, compliance stakeholders consider the larger needs from a compliance, environmental, population health, and fiscal perspective.

Stakeholders can be internal, such as those within your organization, and external, including partners such as Practice Green Health, Stericycle, other suppliers, industry organizations, or group purchasing organizations. Whether internal or external, it's important to involve key stakeholders with varied and applicable expertise. Examples include focused industry experts, value analysis, materials management, support services, clinicians, compliance, or sustainability stakeholders. This list can vary depending on your objective and need.

Engaging appropriate stakeholders will help your organization meet its objectives and goals, whether overarching improvement of community health or supporting pillars such as reducing cost, enhancing efficiencies, reducing environmental impact, or creating access to resources. Waste management can impact all of these areas; missegregation of waste can impact environmental and human health, add cost, and add additional process steps as well as negatively impact community well-being. Appropriate stakeholder engagement is key to reducing risk along every aspect of a material and waste's lifecycle.

How Insufficient Resources Impact Waste Management

If you have engaged the appropriate stakeholders, you will be better able to identify and build a case for needed resources. Resources can include more than just materials or products, for example:

  • Knowledge: Arguably one of the most important resources, without knowledge, it is difficult to make a business case for support of other resources, including financial capital. Understanding all the regulations, industry requirements, supplier, and business requirements for waste management is critical for an effective, compliant, and sustainable program.
  • Labor: Understanding the workflows of each job function will help pinpoint specific needs to meet objectives, whether additional staffing or reducing burden, and sometimes, potential opportunities to enhance efficiencies in the process. The ability to articulate the why, how, what, and where of labor needs can be helpful in risk assessment and business cases.
  • Materials: Similarly, understanding the program and stakeholder needs will drive clarity in material needs.
  • Financial capital: Stakeholder engagement, knowledge and a clear business case and objectives can impact all resource availability, especially financial capital. Stakeholders can help clarify why a specific initiative should be a priority through the demonstration of alignment to objectives, risk analysis, and potential ROI.

How Communication Plays a Role in Proper Waste Management

Communication aligns stakeholders and resources to effectively deliver on any initiative through clear purpose, expectation, role responsibility definition, education, and individual and organizational impact and benefit. Without adequate communication between the correct stakeholders, the effectiveness and availability of resources and the development, implementation, and ongoing project management of an initiative can suffer. Organizations should think carefully about their communication modalities, especially in terms of the audiences, urgency, and topic. Appropriate stakeholder engagement can help drive effective communication for each audience.

Working Towards Improved Outcomes

Healthcare organizations can drive better waste management outcomes by establishing cross-functional working groups or committees dedicated to waste-related focus areas. These groups could concentrate on:

  • Compliance Improvement: Ensuring adherence to all relevant regulations and other requirements.
  • Waste Reduction: Minimizing the generation of waste by lifecycle evaluation.
  • Waste Segregation: Enhancing the separation of waste types for compliant, sustainable disposal.
  • Supplier Collaboration: Working with suppliers to find ways to improve compliance, sustainability, and overall efficiencies.

A comprehensive understanding of the waste lifecycle is critical for developing a compliant and truly sustainable program. This lifecycle encompasses:

  • Resource Extraction: Consider the source materials used to develop products and packaging.
  • Manufacturing: This can include design, development, and manufacturing process using resources.
  • Distribution: This includes the process of delivering products for use in healthcare facilities.
  • Usage: The use and application of materials or products within the facility.
  • Disposal: The final stage where products are discarded, collected, and transported to facilities for aggregation, disposal, or repurposing.

Engaging appropriate stakeholders will help show the impacts of the waste's lifecycle and shape decisions on materials use and management, program design, clarification on needed resources, and communication methodology. This comprehensive approach facilitates the development and maintenance of a sustainable waste management program.

Many factors go into navigating healthcare waste, but when proper stakeholders are engaged, evaluation of the material lifecycle and clarification on needed resources will be better defined, allowing for clearer and more effective communication. Stericycle is here to help answer questions and provide helpful information and direction to help overcome your healthcare waste challenges. Watch this webinar for specific examples and to learn more.

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