The British Government Takes Global Leadership Role on Sustainable Healthcare – and Counts on Regulated Medical Device Reprocessing to Keep Them There

“[The] volume of [medical] products thrown away after a single use - from tourniquets and scissors to high-tech electronics - should concern all of us. We can no longer accept this as normal practice.”

With these strong words, Baroness Merron, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Patient Safety, Women's Health and Mental Health, introduced a welcome new program of her government: the ‘Design For Life Roadmap’.

Published by the UK Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), which oversees the National Health Service (NHS), this ambitious program aims to see the NHS completely eliminate, wherever possible, the use of “single-use” medical devices, and achieve a fully circular healthcare system by 2045.

Naturally, the Roadmap recognizes medical device reprocessing (referred to as “remanufacturing” in the UK and Europe) as a key strategy in achieving these laudable goals. The Roadmap cites the Circular Economy (CE)-Hub’s Medtech Spotlight Report – which itself leveraged the considerable body of research supporting reprocessing – to promote reprocessed devices as reducing cost, waste, and greenhouse gas emissions from the medtech and broader healthcare sectors.

The Roadmap further criticizes the NHS’ continued purchasing of new “single-use” devices despite the availability of environmentally and economically cheaper reprocessed alternatives, and repeatedly calls for cultural, regulatory, and infrastructural changes to increase the use of reprocessed devices.

“Circularity in medtech means designing, procuring and processing medical products in a way that enables them to be reused, remanufactured or recycled, preserving their value for as long as possible,” the authors write. “If [reprocessing best practices] were to be scaled up across the UK,” they continue, “the NHS could save millions of pounds per year on EP catheters alone, just a few product lines among hundreds of thousands.”

With these statements alone, the DHSC joins a growing cohort of prestigious regulatory, academic, and professional institutions that have made such endorsements of reprocessing.

But the Roadmap then takes a further step: it declares the DHSC’s ambition to position the UK as a global leader in the development of a circular economy in the healthcare industry. The authors declare their intention to engage with stakeholders in the healthcare and medtech sectors to get everyone on the same page of pursuing sustainability objectives.

The Association of Medical Device Reprocessors (AMDR) welcomes the scope and ambition offered in this approach, and we are well-positioned to help. The above-cited Medtech Spotlight Report commended AMDR as an example of a trade association advancing circularity in healthcare. We can provide industry data demonstrating the critical role of reprocessing.

We can also help educate DHSC, NHS and the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) on the global regulatory landscape as they pursue their stated goal of working with regulatory authorities in other countries to develop a harmonized, pro-sustainability global framework for healthcare. For example, the authors of the roadmap cite a U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) guidance on “remanufacturing” but acknowledge that that means something different in the U.S.

We would point them instead to the FDA’s recent guidance clarifying that the “single-use” label does not, in fact, mean that a device cannot be reprocessed. We would also encourage them to cooperate with their counterparts across the English Channel, where French authorities are preparing a reprocessing experiment as they revisit their country’s ban on the practice.

We thank and congratulate DHSC for this monumental statement of support for sustainability generally and reprocessing in particular. We thank DHSC’s Josh Crosley and his colleagues for their work on the Roadmap, and we extend our support to them and their objectives.