Plymouth Community Healthcare is to hire two new nurses thanks to £60,000 waste management savings.
The healthcare provider has been able to fund two new nurses thanks to an improved waste management scheme.
Plymouth Community Healthcare saved enough on their waste management to be able to fund for the two roles thanks to £60,000 in savings from a new recycling management initiative introduced in 2013.
The recycling strategy implemented by Alpha Logic has helped to increase the organisation’s recycling output by 60 tonnes per annum, which previously went via landfill.
Plymouth Community Healthcare provide community, physical and mental healthcare for residents in Plymouth. They look to help people stay mentally and physically well and to remain as independent as they can.
Read more: http://www.westernmorningnews.co.uk/Plymouth-Community-Healthcare-hire-new-nurses/
This is great PR for the hospital and for waste management improvements in general.
There are plenty of uncertainties – how much was spent in order to save £60k over 2 years, and how sustainable will those savings be once the drivers have been relaxed, again for the purpose of cost saving, that may result in worsening segregation standards.
And crucially, how were these £60k savings identified? In many studies typically lasting just a couple of weeks, researchers are too often tempted to multiply and annualise those potential savings that they can identify in the full knowledge that savings will never materialise at those levels, if at all.
Most amusing was the Northampton research group who did just this to claim, on a purely theoretical basis only, massive savings that could never happen. Indeed, such was the exaggeration and lack of insight that having seen a spillage and considered the cost of wipes to clean the floor, and their disposal, annualised to a £7,000 yearly saving by preventing spillages!
Get real. And in that vein I hope Plymouth have considered the true value of their savings sensibly, before overspending on new staff.
So, for any waste manager, consultant, or researcher who claims that they can deliver savings through rationalisation of waste management, take great care to collect a large amount of accurate data, resist outrageous annualisation of snapshot data, and resist making claims until you have given them a logic check, and then run them past a management accountant.
And don’t go down this path unless you really understand what happens in the healthcare sector, what happens in hospitals, how and why, and avoid presenting some ludicrous proposition that looks good on paper but is simply unworkable in the context of safe and efficient patient care. But savings can be made, so good luck to Plymouth Community Healthcare. Let’s hope their savings properly materialise.