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The journey for medicines from the pharmacy to make it to the right patient on the right ward is necessarily a quick and accurate process that now produces less single use plastic waste thanks to the Pharmacy team switching to paper delivery bags.

Medicines are bagged to clearly indicate the delivery location as not all medicine boxes allow for easy labelling. These bagged medicines are then delivered to locations all across the hospital, much like a postal service would do. So, an obvious and clear delivery location is extremely important in order for patients not to be waiting unnecessarily for their medication.

Medicines are only bagged from the time of checking within the pharmacy up to the point of delivery which is less than 2 hours use for each bag before disposal. With 28-30,000 being used and entering the waste stream each year!

For as long as current staff can remember (over 20 years!) single use plastic bags have been the delivery vessel but with a commitment to moving away from single use plastics and long term aim to stop using them completely this recent swap to paper bags will help eliminate approximately 56KG of single use plastic per month. That’s saving almost a whopping 700KG of plastic waste annually from ending up in the environment via landfill or onsite incineration just from swapping delivery bags to a renewable & potentially recyclable material.

The switch has been received positively by both pharmacy and nursing staff with the only real issue encountered having been sourcing suitably sized paper bags.

Well done team! This is a shining example to remind us all that reducing the amount of single use plastic is an option all of us have. Whether by looking at using alternative materials or the number of uses an item gets both at work and home, any informed conscious change will help meet our green goals and reduce our impact on the environment.