Goals
Within UCSF Health purchasing, there are two goals:
- Increase Single-use Devices reprocessing collection and purchase through contracts and education
- Increase Environmental Preferred Purchasing
Recent Accomplishments
Reprocessing of single-use medical devices (SUDs) is the practice of inspecting, cleaning, function testing, sterilizing, and packaging so that they can be safely reused again. It is a safe, FDA-approved, sustainable practice that diverts medical and landfills waste. Currently, UCSF works with multiple medical device vendors to collect a variety of invasive and non-invasive devices in the Operating Rooms, Electrophysiology Labs, and on the patient floor, and subsequently purchase back their reprocessed SUDs devices.
Visit our Zero Waste Dashboard for reprocessed device collection metrics.
To learn more about how sustainable purchasing is achieved at UCSF Health, read the UCSF Health's Commitment to Upstream Sustainability: A Model for Success newsletter story.
Future Work
UCSF has been working with Vizient, our Group Purchasing Organization (GPO), to incorporate Environmentally Preferred Purchasing (EPP) attributes tracking into our purchasing system. Vizient has established 23 EPP attributes ranging from free of chemicals of concern (BPA, PFCS, phthalates, etc.), to recyclable packaging. Through more data analytics, UCSF can assess our current state and set targets for increasing EPP in each category.
Visit our Sustainable Purchasing Dashboard for metrics on Environmentally Preferred Purchasing.
