Medical Equipment: Recycling
(asked on 23rd February 2026) - View Source
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what progress has he made in evaluating the outcomes of the Design for Life pilot sites.
The Design for Life (DfL) Roadmap sets out a new strategy to transition away from all avoidable single-use medical technology products towards a functioning circular system by 2045. The Department has shared a ‘One Year On’ update with its wider collaborative who have supported the policymaking, now numbering over 100 organisations. This update can be found publicly at the following link:
https://exeterce.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/20251127-DfL-One-Year-On-update.pdf
More reporting mechanisms will be developed as the programme matures, for example where the roadmap plans for the creation of specific targets and key performance indicators, such as in Action 3. Reporting is done on a quarterly basis to the DfL Advisory Group, which is comprised of key stakeholders, including those from United Kingdom governments, the National Health Service, industry, and academia.
Information on evaluating outcomes of the recent DfL pilots can be found on the Centre for Sustainable Healthcare’s website, who were our partner on these pilots, at the following link:
These pilots observed that in most cases both cost and carbon savings can be found and staff satisfaction can be either maintained or improved. The Department is building on these evaluations with a dedicated Priority Adoption Working Group, which includes clinical and procurement professionals, to identify the products with the strongest case for safe, immediate transitions to reusables across the NHS. To date this group has evaluated over 50 products.
These transitions will be supported by many technical assessments, including those relating to the readiness of supply chains, reprocessing infrastructure, and staff. The decision to commit to a transition, for example whether to support a transition of certain types of endoscopes or not, will be made on the basis that is it safe, feasible, and valuable in the long-term following these and other assessments. At this juncture these assessments are still underway and so estimates cannot be provided at this time.