A circular economy involves maintaining manufactured products in circulation, distributing resource and environmental costs over time and usage. In a linear supply chain, manufactured products are used once and discarded. In high-income nations, health care systems increasingly rely on linear supply chains composed of single-use disposable medical devices. This has resulted in increased health care expenditures and health care–generated waste and pollution, with associated public health damages. It has also caused the supply chain to be vulnerable to disruption and demand fluctuations. Transformation of the medical device industry to a more circular economy would advance the goal of providing increasingly complex care in a low-emissions future. Barriers to circularity include perceptions regarding infection prevention, behaviors of device consumers and manufacturers, and regulatory structures that encourage the proliferation of disposable medical devices. Complementary policy- and market-driven solutions are required to encourage systemic transformation.
The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the vulnerability of the linear supply chain. For example, one driver of shortages in PPE was that most N95s were manufactured in Wuhan, China, so production and transportation were both disrupted at a time of increased demand. Your investment in P100s is an excellent example investing in the circular economy through reusable PPE.
The article was a collaborative effort that included physicians from a variety of specialties (surgery, anesthesiology, gastroenterology, infectious diseases) as well as engineers. It was a huge effort translating medicine-speak into health-policy speak.