The UK government has announced a plan to move away from single-use medtech products towards a “circular system” involving more remanufacture and recycling.
A newly published “roadmap” document explains that circularity in medtech means designing, procuring and processing medical products in a way that enables them to be reused, remanufactured or recycled, preserving their value for as long as possible.
The benefits of a circular economy in the health sector are “vast and increasingly well-understood, but are rarely put into practice and are difficult to scale,” the report reads.
Baroness Gillian Merron, the parliamentary under-secretary of state for patient safety, has published the roadmap to deliver the government’s “ambition to transition away from all avoidable single-use medical technology products towards a functioning circular system by 2045 that maximises reuse, remanufacture and recycling”.
The new approach is based upon the principle that circularity in medtech means designing, procuring and processing medical products in a way that enables them to be reused, remanufactured or recycled, preserving their value for as long as possible.
It aims to boost UK growth, improve NHS resilience, reduce waste and emissions and generate substantial cost savings.
Within the document, the government sets out a plan of 30 actions to deliver its 2045 vision, which will involve:
Steps to achieving this include exploring new commercial incentives to provide circular medtech, creating new standards to enable innovative products and services and planning the decontamination and recycling infrastructure of the future.
Baroness Merron said: “Every single MedTech product purchased by the NHS is bought because we prioritise and always will prioritise patient care and safety. But the volume of products thrown away after a single use – from tourniquets and scissors to high-tech electronics – should concern all of us. We can no longer accept this as normal practice.”
Meanwhile, it was also announced this week that the UK introduce a new regulatory framework that enables the regulation of “innovative health products” to be manufactured at or close to the location where a patient receives care.
A Statutory Instrument (SI) laid in Parliament yesterday means that medicines with a very short shelf life or which are highly personalised could more easily be made in or near a hospital setting and can get to the patients who need them safely and much more quickly.
The regulation would also allow for manufacture of innovative medicines in small, portable units that can be set up close to patients who may be too sick to travel or whose reduced immunity precludes travel or where rapid medicine availability is best served.
Its aim is to “transform patient treatment by enabling the safe development of innovative, personalised products such as cell or gene therapy that need to be manufactured close to the individual patient”.
Ian Rees, point of care lead at the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), said: “Enabling patients to safely access innovative treatments and medicines is a top priority for the MHRA, which is why we have developed this novel regulatory framework.
“This will enable new and innovative ways of manufacturing medicines closer to the patients who need them whilst ensuring their quality, safety and efficacy, with the consequent benefits both to patients and the healthcare system.
“This totally new framework, the first of its kind in the world, supports the MHRA’s drive to deliver for patients; making it possible to safely manufacture breakthrough medicines closer to where care is delivered and increasing the attractiveness of the UK as a destination to market new life-saving medicines.”
The legislation proposes a six-month implementation period once Parliamentary processes have been concluded. This regulation could, therefore, become law in Summer 2025.
The regulation follows a consultation with stakeholders in 2021, which showed a high level of support for proposals for a regulatory framework for point of care and modular manufacture of medicinal products.
