The PiP offers you a means of simplifying the process for collecting a mid-stream urine specimen, as a rough guide for every thousand in-patient beds a provider of care will carry out somewhere in the region of twenty one thousand mid-stream urine tests a year as a minimum. The process is often highly variable and so we offer an opportunity to standardise that process in a more sustainable way.
Materials
The PiP is manufactured from a blend of sugar cane pulp and bamboo fibre and is specially designed to facilitate midstream urine sampling. It can simply be macerated after single use. It is registered as a class one in-vitro diagnostic device and is UK CA marked.
Carbon Impact Saving
The carbon impact savings are significant – being at least a seventy eight percent saving in carbon emissions when we have analysed current best practice versus the PiP and both Greener NHS and Supply Chain bodies are supportive of its adoption. Your procurement team will have the product ordering code. We hope you will find this a very acceptable innovative product and adopt it for routine mid-stream urine collection.
Cost Savings
You can expect to save somewhere in the region of £9,000 per annum through swapping out single use sterile plastic vessels and the 30ml boric acid tube that are often part of the mid-stream collection process plus pipettes and syringes used as part of the processing. Your savings from not having to incinerate said plastic items should be in the region of £500 a year based on average contractual plastic waste incineration costs per tonne (John, 2024).
The indirect cost savings due to a shorter and easier process for the healthcare assistant involved in taking the urine specimen is significant. For every 1,000 in-patient beds occupied a year, this is going to be around 9,300 hours of healthcare assistants’ time and around 3,000 hours of medical laboratory assistant’s time in otherwise decanting urine. For Somerset NHS Foundation Trust with around 1,000 in-patient beds across Acute, Community and Mental Health sites this has an indirect cost savings value of £230,000 a year. In practice that time can be spent on other patient-facing care tasks and other vital laboratory work, making our health system more efficient.