Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what mechanisms exist to support waste-reduction trials with NHS trusts.

The Department and NHS England are always looking at ways of reducing waste and increasing efficiency. NHS England has had many discussions with National Health Service trusts on the reduction, elimination, and reuse of single-use polypropylene curtains, and have published best practice with regards to safe and sustainable management of healthcare waste.

In addition, the Department has published the Design for Life Roadmap, a new strategy to transition away from all avoidable single-use medical technology (medtech) products towards a functioning circular system by 2045. This means designing, procuring, and processing medtech products in a way that maximises reuse, remanufacture, and recycling, thus preserving their value for as long as possible. The document sets out a plan of 30 actions to deliver the 2045 vision, which involve:

• driving positive behavioural change;
• exploring new commercial incentives to provide circular medtech, including value-based procurement;
• creating new standards to enable innovative products and services;
• planning the decontamination and recycling infrastructure of the future; and
• establishing new collaborations to accelerate the emergence of transformative science.

The Design for Life Roadmap is available at the following link:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/design-for-life-roadmap

As part of its work, the Design for Life programme maintains a list of products where circular alternatives are already available, and, for those with the highest potential benefits, explores means to accelerate adoption across the NHS. Ward curtains are on this product list, where a dedicated group, including procurement and clinical experts, are working to explore how the adoption of reusable versions can be supported.

With regards to trials, the Design for Life programme has commissioned several pilots within NHS trusts to explore safe transitions from single-use to reusables, where the results have been published and cascaded among the NHS community. Furthermore, NHS England has developed and deployed an Innovation Portal to help document, evaluate, test, and deploy innovations in waste management across the NHS in England.