Murrumbidgee LHD reports

Our annual reports

Download or read our reports:

Quality and Safety Accounts

Service Agreements

Corporate Governance Attestation Statements

Our financial statements

Our financial statements highlight the budget allocations for each year and performance against these.

Budget Allocation Summaries

Facility Budgets

Audited Financial Statements

Our annual public meeting

Each year we hold an Annual Public Meeting to share our highlights in healthcare service delivery, the future of healthcare across MLHD, and provide an opportunity for the community to ask questions to staff, clinicians and the executive team.

If a question needs to be taken on notice at the event, the response is published on our website after the event.

2025 Questions and Answers

Question

There is a lot of plastic waste going into our general waste bins each day - is there anything that can be done to reduce this?

Answer

Public hospitals generate large volumes of plastic waste through single-use clinical items and through food services, cleaning products and office consumables. Much of this plastic is currently classified as clinical or related waste and is currently disposed of via high-temperature treatment or landfill under NSW Health’s PD2020_049 Clinical and Related Waste Management for Health Services policy (PDF 614.17KB), which requires safe and legally compliant management of all waste streams.

The NSW Environment Protection Authority (EPA)’s NSW Plastics Plan 2.0 requires a phased approach to the reduction of unnecessary plastics with goals to reduce plastic litter by 30% by 2025, triple plastics recycling by 2030, and drive greater use of recycled content across government procurement.

Infection prevention, patient safety and TGA/clinical standards often require sterile single-use products, limiting opportunities to simply “ban” plastics. Waste is also highly mixed; clinical and general waste streams are frequently contaminated, making plastics hard to segregate and recycle in busy clinical environments. This means that we have some opportunities in specific areas, including:

Moving toward higher-value segregation of plastics
- Phasing out unnecessary single-use items where safe alternatives exist
- Embedding circular-economy and recycled-content criteria into procurement
- Using waste and emissions data to track progress against net zero commitments while still meeting strict clinical safety requirements

Murrumbidgee Local Health District (MLHD) has been conducting “Bin Trim” audits across the district in the past 12 months. Bin Trim audits are part of the NSW EPA’s Bin Trim Program to analyse waste streams and identify opportunities to reduce landfill. The audits included a review of existing waste contracts, bin configurations, contamination levels, staff practices, and opportunities to improve recycling or introduce new recovery streams such as organics, cardboard, soft plastics or metals. Following the audits, the district now has a Bin Trim Waste Action Plan outlining practical recommendations to reduce waste and improve environmental performance. MLHD is currently preparing for waste management workshops across the LHD with opportunities identified to:

increase comingled recycling
avoid plastic water bottles
collect and recycle soft plastics
avoid paper waste.

The District is achieving targets in paper/cardboard and eWaste recycling and reduced emissions. Other projects that have been driven by staff are contributed to improvements in waste management include:

Reduction and diversion of blister packs
Recycling single use dental instruments
Repurposing compression devices with the supplier
PVC recycling in cardiology
Reducing plastics to transport blood products
Reduction of single-use sterile towels
Bin Trim audits and action plans have been expanded to other services and sites (including Renal)
MLHD is currently developing a plan to implement an organics (food and green waste) collection service across our sites in collaboration with HeathShare NSW. Food organic waste diversion at Wagga Wagga Base Hospital is mandated to be in place by mid-2026. Griffith Base Hospital and Leeton are mandated to follow in 2027.