Nicole Corbiere, a Registered Nurse in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) at Children’s Hospital at LHSC, holds up a bin used to collect unused medical supplies for donation.
April 11, 2025
London Health Sciences Centre (LHSC) has launched a new sustainability program designed to reduce waste and help health-care clinics in need worldwide.
Led by the LHSC Green Team and Facilities Management, the program – called Second Chance Supplies –is a low-to-no-cost program that will help the hospital keep waste from reaching landfills and improve the handling of supplies in participating departments.
“The Green Team and Facilities Management are always looking for opportunities to enhance LHSC’s environmental stewardship and operational efficiency,” said Mike Apostol, Green Team Lead and Energy Management Specialist at LHSC. “Second Chance Supplies directly addresses waste reduction and the disposal of usable medical supplies.”
Second Chance Supplies was originally launched as a pilot program in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) at Children’s Hospital at LHSC to donate typically discarded medical supplies. When a patient is discharged from the hospital, many of the medical supplies that have been brought into their room – regardless of whether they’ve been used or not – must be discarded due to Infection Prevention and Control (IPAC) measures. This is an important step to ensure the safety of all patients, but it often leads to the discarding of unused supplies, including transparent dressings, sterile syringes, and various plastic collection containers such as urine specimen bottles.
These unused supplies are now being collected by frontline staff in the NICU and organized by the Green Team before being provided to partners who distribute them to health-care clinics around the world who are in critical need of supplies.
As of March 2025, the program has already helped Not Just Tourists send several shipments of much-needed medical supplies to clinics and hospitals in Cuba. The Green Team hopes to expand the program to begin collecting supplies from other clinical areas.
“This program is really important, and it means a lot to me,” says Nicole Corbiere, a Registered Nurse and member of the Green Team who helped introduce the program to the NICU. “I think that if one large organization can make a positive impact on the environment, other organizations will follow and be able to make a similar impact.”
In addition to facilitating the donation of supplies, LHSC Environmental Waste Specialists conducted an audit of all supplies collected from the NICU. This has allowed them to identify which supplies are most often being discarded to help leaders in the NICU create a plan to stop waste where it occurs.
The team is working to streamline its internal processes with partner programs to increase donation capacity and expand the program to more departments throughout the hospital.
“By giving these materials a second life, this program not only promotes environmental responsibility but also enhances resource efficiency,” explains Apostol.
Through a secondary, less frequent component of the program, LHSC has also begun donating large medical equipment recovered in capital projects to health-care clinics in need. In March, LHSC partnered with Collaboration Sante Internationale to send eight surgical lights that were recently replaced with upgraded lights during operating room renovations to several hospitals in need in developing countries.
Second Chance Supplies aligns with LHSC’s broader commitment to sustainability, waste reduction, and responsible resource management. Through this program, the hospital is demonstrating how even small steps can drive meaningful change in both the global health-care system and the environment.