What if we could not only reduce waste in health care, but also the distress that it causes health-care workers?
Every day in health-care settings across BC, unopened, unused medical supplies are discarded. Not because they are defective, but because there is no approved pathway to redirect them. For Jacqueline Louro, a licensed practical nurse (LPN) at BC Cancer – Prince George, watching perfectly good supplies head to the landfill was something she could not ignore.
Her response was a quality improvement project called Minimizing Waste, Maximizing Impact — an initiative to develop a formal donation guideline that would give unused medical supplies a second life, primarily through health-care training and education programs.
The hope of this project was to repurpose waste, decrease eco anxiety amongst staff and support health-care education and training.” — Jacqueline Louro, LPN, BC Cancer
What began as a straightforward plan to collect surplus supplies and donate them to a local nursing college quickly revealed a gap: no organizational policy existed to govern the process.
Louro pivoted, channeling her energy into drafting a donation guideline from scratch. The work required navigating infection control requirements, liability concerns, and complex cross-departmental collaboration, including working with Infection Prevention And Control and Risk Management to establish a waiver of liability and define which items could safely be donated.
The results speak to both the scale of the problem and the potential of the solution. In just three months, Louro collected 2,473 items destined for disposal and 95% of them had their life cycle extended through donation.
This project highlights an easy way to move health care toward a circular economy and acknowledge the full life cycle of these products.” — Jacqueline Louro, LPN, BC Cancer
Beyond reducing waste, the project addresses something less tangible but equally important: staff and medical staff wellbeing. Many health-care workers experience distress when they are required to discard supplies they know are still usable. A clear, supported pathway for donation can ease that burden and strengthen a culture of environmental stewardship.
The guideline has sparked broader conversations at a provincial level, and PHSA partners are now exploring potential ways to scale and integrate the project into procurement and supply chain systems province-wide.
