‘Yesterday I wore 15 disposable gowns’: Doctor decries pandemic’s waste
Melbourne intensivist Dr Forbes McGain is on a mission to reduce the mountain of PPE waste generated as a result of COVID-19
A Melbourne intensivist is at the front line of not only the pandemic, but also a battle against the mountains of hospital waste generated by COVID-19.
Dr Forbes McGain has seen a staggering increase in infectious clinical waste in the ICU where he’s been working for the past 18 months.
He estimates that at Western Health’s three acute public hospitals alone, staff have gone from using barely a few hundred single-use plastic gowns a week to 3000 a day since the pandemic began.
Normally, an ICU nurse would have used none of these gowns because patients aren’t infectious, he said.
