How should safety be considered in a clinical waste contract pricing decision?

Staff and patient safety should always be considered alongside cost, service performance and compliance rather than treated as an optional extra.

For a sharps or clinical waste service, this can include the design and placement of containers, how often waste needs to be handled, staff education, collection processes and the controls in place to reduce exposure to sharps and other hazardous waste.

A pricing decision should therefore consider what the service is designed to do inside the healthcare environment, not simply what it costs to remove waste from site. The financial value of every safety improvement won’t always be easy to isolate, but the level of exposure to incidents, disruption and non-compliance should form part of the overall assessment.