After carrying out research Milan found that 90% of healthcare administrators personally support medical recycling and 55% think that medical recycling aligns with their organisation’s core mission, but only a little over 9% of them are currently willing to implement a formal medical recycling program in their organisations. This is the gap that Milan is trying to bridge, through increasing awareness and promoting acceptance of these types of schemes.

This lack of willingness seems to mainly be around two areas: the worry of malpractice, or potential infection. In fact there is nothing illegal about medical recycling, there’s just almost no public awareness of it, which can lead people to think it may be sketchy when it isn’t. At the same time the worry of devices being not properly sterilised is understandable; some people feel uncomfortable just with the idea of buying secondhand clothes that have been worn by someone else. The reality, however, is that many items in medicine are already being used over and over again. It’s not like in every operation the surgeon uses a new set of tools, because there are adequate measures in place to sterilise and clean these items. These measures can also be applied to medical devices, meaning that as long as there is a standardised procedure in place, there’s nothing to worry about. It just requires a little perspective shift.

What can we do?