Harringay/Veolia Clinical Waste Collection

Harringay Online carries the following plea from a resident trying hard to dispose of a small sharps bin, and trapped in a cycle of communication failure and inertia between the Council, GP, contractor (Veolia) and others:

“I am now in the 5th calendar month of trying to get a tiny box of sharps collected by Veolia. It has been an unbelievable saga where Peter doesn’t talk to Paul. Firstly they told me I had to get a letter from the GP, the GP contacted them and were told that it wasn’t necessary as my address had already been registered. So I call up to book the collection and am told again that I need to get the GP to send a letter. The GP does so, reluctantly, by email as requested. The email is then lost (by Haringey or Veolia I am not sure) and so it goes on. Eventually the address is registered and a collection is booked. This is after about 2 months.

“Veolia turn up to collect but oh no they cannot collect the sharps’ bin as the lid is purple and not yellow and leave it behind. The sharps’ bin was provided on prescription by a local pharmacy and is now sealed so I cannot get the needles out. For the past 3 weeks I have been promised that they would make an exception and accept the purple lid and that the bins would be collected “tomorrow”, “within a week” etc. But so far we still have a purple lidded sharps bin.

“Apart from the moan I would like to know whether anyone else has come across this in relation to medical waste and also any suggestions of what can be done. I have repeatedly asked to escalate but just receive apologies from the admin. If this service is so useless it could lead to quite dangerous dumping of medical waste.

We do not have sufficient information to judge quite who is at fault. Indeed, it maybe nobody’s fault and just a system that has never previously been tested and fails on first use (though that must be somebody’s fault!).

So, come on everyone, pull our your various digits and get the job properly.

 

 

 

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