Our Integrated Laboratory Medicine (ILM) sustainability team has won the Sustainability Award at the Institute of Biomedical Science Awards 2024.
The judges commended the team for their great ideas which they said could be implemented by all labs, and that sustainability had been fully embraced thanks to good engagement with the Trust and the wider community.
Newcastle Hospitals was the first healthcare organisation in the world to declare a climate emergency in 2019 and following this the integrated laboratory medicine (ILM) sustainability team was created in April 2022 to support the Trust’s Climate Emergency Strategy.
The team’s main focus is on reducing single-use plastics wherever possible-saving over one million specimen bags a year, and their flagship project is to reduce waste associated with sample transport.
One project has been successfully rolled out to stakeholders that incorporates reusable sample transport boxes, negating the need for plastic specimen bags.
Further work is progressing in scaling up prototype designs developed in collaboration with colleagues in medical physics for airtube inserts and boxes to accommodate microbiology samples. The ILM Sustainability Team is also looking to expand the use of reusable delivery boxes to reduce the mountain of cardboard generated every day.
The team is committed to supporting Sustainable Healthcare in Newcastle (Shine) with the goal of making sustainability business-as-usual within laboratory medicine, with sustainability embedded in their directorate strategy for the first time.
They are currently working with colleagues at University College London who have developed the Laboratory Efficiency Assessment Framework (LEAF) to promote sustainability within the laboratory environment. They have received their Bronze award and are working towards Gold and Silver.
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