Episode 073 | September 11, 2023 | 31:30
Guest: Addie MacGregor (ABHI, Sustainability Executive)
Published: September 11, 2023
Duration: 31:30
Description
Addie MacGregor from the Association of British HealthTech Industries discusses the healthcare sector’s efforts to decarbonize and the importance of collaboration. She highlights the role of the NHS in driving sustainability, and the challenges faced by small and medium-sized enterprises. Tune in for the support ABHI provides to its members and the opportunities and challenges in remanufacturing and reusing medical devices.
Full transcript
About this transcript
This transcript was automatically generated and may contain inaccuracies, typos, or mistranslations. Episodes recorded before 2024 were transcribed by an on-site model and may have a higher error rate. The content reflects the original conversation to the best of our ability. For the authoritative version, please listen to the audio episode.
Frederik: Hello and welcome to the Sustainable Healthcare Podcast. This is the first recording after the summer of 2023 — and the news has been dark. Forest fires in Southern Europe, ocean temperatures rising, scientific reports suggesting the Gulf Stream might stop in 2025-2095, Earth Overshoot Day. The UN Secretary General has baptized this the period of “global boiling.” Today I have Addie MacGregor from ABHI in the UK.
Addie: ABHI stands for Association of British HealthTech Industries — the trade body in the UK covering medical devices, diagnostics, and digital health. The big pharma players aren’t in our scope — we have Philips, Medtronic, Johnson & Johnson and many smaller players. Our sector is very SME-heavy, which makes collaboration and funding much harder than in pharma.
Our membership is over 400 — about 300 are manufacturers (catheters, MRI machines, wound dressings, orthopedics), plus digital and diagnostics members, plus corporate members like regulation consultancies and law firms. I’m the sustainability executive — the first dedicated sustainability hire — for an organization of about 16-17 people. The board and membership saw sustainability was important enough to dedicate a resource for it.
The biggest catalyst right now is the NHS. The UK is dedicated to net zero in healthcare by 2045, and NHS England has a Net Zero Supplier Roadmap. To keep doing business with the NHS, you have to follow this roadmap. Every tender has social value questions, and carbon reduction plans are pass/fail to get contracts.
Members’ maturity varies a lot. Sometimes they have dedicated sustainability leads; sometimes it’s whoever happened to be in the right or wrong place. The world is watching the UK and the NHS as the first to nationalize these requirements in procurement. We’re working with the NHS too — their procurement leads aren’t sustainability experts either. There are teething problems. Lots of support available; communicating it is the main job.
No single person knows everything there is to know about sustainability and healthcare. The field is so young that data and knowledge are still emerging. We are paving the way as we bike it.
ABHI has a sustainability working group — one of our larger groups. I emphasize it shouldn’t just be sustainability leads attending — organizational change has to be cross-functional and not weigh on one person’s shoulders. We host webinars (about six this year). We try to bridge industry and academia. Strength is in being a conduit between industry, academia, NHS and government.
Frederik: Collaboration is key — turning every stone reveals a new complex problem. NHS setting direction toward net zero is powerful and echoes across Europe — most procurement professionals orient toward the NHS direction. The NHS is the largest single healthcare provider in Europe, possibly the world. By comparison Denmark has five regions coordinating for six million people.
Addie: What we need to work on most: cross-sector collaboration (learnings from other sectors) and behavior change — getting everyone on board takes an inordinate amount of collaboration.
Remanufacturing example: taking a medical device at end of life and remanufacturing it back to the same level of safety. Post-COVID and over the last 20 years we’ve moved heavily to single-use. Sometimes there is opportunity for remanufacture or reusable, with no compromise on patient safety. To remanufacture you need to talk to your R&D team, your logistics, your hospital contracts, ensure liability is known every step of the journey. Waste legislation has become an unexpected barrier — local councils not picking up clinical waste whether used or not. Sterilization infrastructure needs to scale. All for one product, let alone the whole system.
Frederik: The biggest challenge with remanufacturing isn’t safety — it’s the business model and IP. The company that’s best at producing a device may not be best at reprocessing it. Likely we’ll see new specialised reprocessing actors take a multitude of devices, take over liability from original producer, and return them to market with satisfactory safety — but they’d gain crucial knowledge that could compromise original IP. Forward-looking medtechs need to orient toward this — the market screamed for single-use for a long time, but if you want to future-proof your business, you need answers on remanufacturing and reuse. It is going to happen whether you like it or not.
Addie: Many companies are doing it. But the challenges are massive — nothing will change overnight, and not many solutions right now are scalable. Lots of individual solutions for certain products. Scaling across an incredibly diverse sector is hard. Better to think out the full extent of impact and avoid unintended consequences than rush solutions that inadvertently make things worse.
Thank you Addie. Thanks for listening — please share the podcast.