Oliver Hunt’s company is diverting more than a tonne of waste a week from New Zealand hospitals by helping them reuse “single-use” medical devices.
Hunt spends his working hours as founder and owner of a remanufacturing business, but in his free time, he’s in the outdoors: running, mountain biking, skiing and surfing. They’re two worlds, but in the eyes of the Christchurch entrepreneur, they’re aligned.
In 2017, Hunt founded Medsalv, he says, to make healthcare more sustainable by not only reducing hospitals’ waste and costs, but also creating environmental benefits by keeping products out of landfill and reducing carbon emissions.
“I didn’t want to go out mountain biking and surfing and skiing and then feel like when I went to work, I was doing something that was incongruous with those things. And I’d always wanted a business I could sink my teeth into, something that aligned with me and was a good place to learn.”
Hospitals use a number of devices labelled for single use, and in some cases, this is imperative to ensure patient safety. However, others have been labelled as such because the original manufacturer hasn’t done the necessary testing or provided the data required to label them “reusable”, when they can actually be safely reused under certain conditions.
It’s these devices, which would ordinarily be sent straight to landfill once used, that Hunt’s company collects from hospitals. Medsalv then cleans, tests, inspects and repackages them before returning them to hospitals for safe clinical reuse – typically at a lower price than the original products.
The process is called remanufacturing because the returned products are individually tested to perform as new, and it’s done at Medsalv’s ISO-accredited facility.
Hunt lists a number of benefits to the process: “Financial sustainability, because the price is cheaper; environmental sustainability, because it creates fewer carbon emissions and less waste going to landfill; and supply-chain sustainability, because you don’t have to ship stuff all the way around the world to use it. And then finally, social sustainability. So, better-quality patient care is an obvious social lever, and the other one for us is employing people who have barriers to employment.”
About 30% of Medsalv’s workforce have overcome some form of barrier – an intellectual disability, for example, or mental health issues – to work with the company. Overcoming those barriers might involve designing a role for a person, or modifying equipment or other elements of the workplace to make it suitable and inclusive, he says.
Medsalv now works with almost all private New Zealand hospitals that do surgery, and most public hospitals. Hunt says the company recently surpassed more than $2 million in savings for New Zealand hospitals collectively, and is reducing their waste by more than a tonne each week.
As part of the remanufacturing process, every product is uniquely identified and can subsequently be tracked. Some devices can be reused up to 14 times, and when they come to the end of their life, Medsalv recycles their materials. It’s what’s called a circular business model, and last year, the company was commended in the Going Circular section of the Sustainable Business Awards (it won the category in 2019).
James Griffin leads the Sustainable Business Network’s efforts to accelerate the circular economy, which he describes as a sustainable alternative to the predominant “take – make – waste” approach of the “linear economy”.
In the circular economy, waste and pollution are designed out at the start, while the materials that are used are kept circulating through the likes of reuse or remanufacture.
The circular approach presents challenges and opportunities. “Mindsets and systems across the value chain are very much aligned to optimise a linear economy approach,” says Griffin. “Medsalv is introducing a new business model into the sector, which needs new mindsets – from equipment buyers, for example – and systems such as collection systems to be established, all of which require time, effort and investment.”
But the economic opportunities, including job creation, and cost savings are significant, he says, while reusing equipment requires less virgin material to be extracted and less energy to manufacture new products.
Southern Cross Healthcare’s national sustainability lead Vanessa Neven recalls first meeting Hunt in early 2020 before undertaking an initial trial with Medsalv in one of its hospitals that year.
“He had a solution and an opportunity to bring about some positive change in how we manage some of those single-use devices. We obviously can’t get rid of them, because they’re crucial for our patients. So, it’s really important that we do something and he was providing an alternative solution to landfill.”
Now, all 16 Southern Cross hospitals work with the company to divert a range of single-use devices – such as patient transfer mattresses, DVT sleeves and blood pressure cuffs – from landfill, so far saving 5765kg of waste.
“It’s helped us create another opportunity to divert waste and that helps reduce our own environmental footprint and helps reduce our carbon emissions as well,” Neven says.
Medicine in the family
Hunt comes from a family of medical professionals. His mother and uncle are doctors, and he has an aunt who’s a physiotherapist. For years, he wanted to follow in his uncle’s footsteps and become a surgeon, but he ultimately opted to study mechanical engineering at the University of Canterbury. However, when he was searching for a project for his master of engineering management, it was his uncle who suggested he look into reusing single-use medical devices.
So, what appealed to him about the idea? “First and foremost, I needed a project and I needed one quickly. Second, it was actually likely to be able to be turned into a profitable business. In my view, the best way to make an impact is to have an impact-focused, profitable business, rather than some form of charity.”
He always had an entrepreneurial bent – reading books about successful entrepreneurs and entering competitions run by the university’s commerce society – but his training has helped him on Medsalv’s journey.
“Mechanical engineering, and engineering in general, is a great foundational place to learn things that will be useful in a business as well. Ultimately, it’s all about seeing a thing that needs to be built to solve a problem, and then defining that problem, figuring out what needs to be done, and moving that on.”
Hunt’s research has included trips to look into aspects of how the industry works overseas. But given New Zealand’s relatively small size compared with places like the US, where large, expensive machines can be employed, Medsalv has had to develop how it remanufactures devices largely from the ground up.
That has the benefit, however, of allowing the company to engineer the financial, environmental and social benefits it wants to achieve into its processes, he says.
“There are things you can do in your own life to reduce your impact, but I think by forming a company that is solely focused on doing that in a way that is profitable, and also does some other things, it has a greater impact.
“It also creates a leadership position from which you can show other companies in the space, and around the country and around the world, what’s possible if you think about sustainability from the outset.”
