“Oh my gosh!” said Brock Slabach, the vice president for member services. “Some of the equipment I know folks would be interested in.”
Slabach said more than 600 rural hospitals are so strapped financially they risk closure and according to the data, some may be uncomfortably similar to facilities in Algeria and Bangladesh. Wealthier hospitals’ waste could help them stay afloat.

“Every little bit helps,” he said. “None of these things will cure the entire problem altogether. But it would be helpful to meet a need in a community.”
Unfortunately, quantifying what’s being squandered is difficult. There is scant research, so it’s easy for hospitals to say it doesn’t add up to much.

Dr. Corinna Zygourakis, the chief neurosurgery resident at UCSF, who has studied operating room waste, said hospitals may not like what they’d find. “It’s not nice to say, ‘Hey, look at the amount of money we’re wasting.”

She decided to study waste after a medical mission trip to Mexico in 2015. At UCSF it was common to set out an array of disposable surgical instruments in the sterile field of the operating room just in case a surgeon needed them. Often the surgeon wouldn’t even touch the instruments, but they, nevertheless, had to be discarded. In Mexico, they wouldn’t have been.

Zygourakis and a team of colleagues tracked 58 neurosurgeries at UCSF and tallied the unused supplies that were discarded. In 26 surgeries, all the blood clotting materials weren’t used, for a total of $3,749. In 16, an expensive tissue adhesive wasn’t used at a cost of $3,495. Screws were wasted on three cases, totaling $3,144. The items marked as wasted were not billed to patients, and were donated whenever possible, she said.

But the study’s findings, published in Journal of Neurosurgery in 2016, were eye-opening: The public hospital wasted an estimated $968 per neurosurgery case, which amounted to about $2.9 million over the course of a year.

UCSF reviewed all the preference cards for each surgeon, which specify how the operating room should be set up before each operation. The hospital now makes sure the set-up doesn’t include supplies that aren’t actually needed, preventing a significant amount of the waste.

In a separate study in the December edition of JAMA Surgery, Zygourakis and her colleagues showed each UCSF surgeon his or her direct costs per procedure in comparison to other surgeons in the institution. Most doctors were unaware of operating-room costs. Then they gave them an incentive: Their departments would get a bonus if they reduced costs by at least 5 percent.

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