Blacktown launches pilot for sustainable trials

The exciting new sustainability project has launched last month after being chosen as one of nine recipients of a Sustainable Futures Innovation Fund grant. 

Blacktown Hospital Medical Oncology Clinical Trials Unit has partnered with the Cancer Institute NSW with the aim to reduce the unit’s environmental footprint.  

It’s easy to see why Western Sydney Local Health District has been selected for the trial – as the state’s leading district for the number of cancer clinical trials conducted.

In the 10 years since the department was established, Blacktown has become a hub for novel and clinical trials with more than 200 clinical trials running in medical oncology.

Blacktown Medical Oncology Research operations manager, Raymond Tangunan, has been working in clinical trials at Westmead and Blacktown Hospitals for several decades and has seen firsthand the waste this can create. 

“The purpose of this study is to see how we can repurpose these supplies rather than throwing away perfectly clean and sterile items in the bin. How can we repurpose them in a way that is useful for someone else?” Raymond said. 

When a trial has been given approval to commence, the pharmaceutical company commonly sends the hospital supplies for the approximate number of patients the trial has been approved for. 

This means the hospital can receive multiple pallets of supplies at a time. 

On occasions when the number of patients enrolled in that trial are less than the quantity supplied, or if supplies expire before people have enrolled, it leaves the department with sterile but excess supplies. 

“Because of space constraints in the hospital, we have to dismantle the boxes and dispose of them accordingly, creating a lot of unnecessary waste.” Raymond said.

Often due to the specific nature of the supplies in the kits, these medical supplies can’t be repurposed within the hospital but still hold value. 

Ad-hoc solutions are developed around the hospital by resourceful staff, such as driving pipettes to the local high school to be used in science classes but require staff members to do it off their own back and in their own time. 

Now, the new project has developed a database with the aim to fulfill several purposes, the first is to catalogue the range of items and the number of items. 

“When people want those items, they can log into this database and see all these supplies that are for grabs,” Raymond said. 

The database being accessible also eases the pressure from those clinicians in those trials from coordinating the distribution. 

“Using the database, they just need to indicate how much of it they want rather than emailing me or calling me, it's all tracked,” Raymond said. 

Raymond says this type of program doesn’t just benefit the hospital by freeing up precious space, but it can help reduce costs for the receiving organisation too. 

Partnerships with local high schools as well as teaching spaces like TAFE and local universities can benefit from having visibility and access to clean, free resources. 

“The supplies are all clean and unused. From a cost perspective, they could use what we're throwing out instead of having to buy it themselves for training,” Raymond said. 

The project is currently in a three-month pilot, and Raymond is hopeful it will be extended and eventually rolled out more broadly. 

“One of the endpoints of this pilot is that everything has to be weighed, so we can calculate a figure in terms of carbon emissions.”