Maintaining rechargeable batteries is a lot of work. It’s not just the hassle of having to charge it. If it absolutely has to work 100% reliably, you need to keep track of how old each battery pack is, how many times it’s been recharged, etc.
Modern Li-Ion batteries are much better than older types of rechargeable batteries, but they still have finite life, and are more expensive than disposable batteries.
I am often appalled at how much disposable medical stuff I throw away in a day. I will save unused but useful items like steristrips, alcohol swabs, rolls of tape, packages of alcohol swabsticks, etc. Scissors, forceps, staple removers I usually give to the patients. I’ve had a few patients on IV pumps that used fresh batteries daily (supplied by the infusion company), they all had a stockpile of years’ worth of barely used AA batteries.
What gotpasswords said, and it’s not just batteries. Some of it has to do with billing and reimbursement.
Most, if not all, hospitals and facilities use a prepacked tray of supplies and instruments for the most common procedures. Obviously, the doctor or nurse doing the procedure may not use all of the stuff in the tray, but it’s available if they need it. Because they’re billing for the entire tray, any unused supplies may not be able to be returned to the supply room because the supplies were in a package that was accounted for. They can’t be used again because the hospital can’t charge for them again because they were already paid for once. It’s like paying for ten items at a supermarket, then putting four of them back on the shelf to be purchased again. It doesn’t work. So some of it walks out with the patient or the nurse because what the hell, it’s bought and paid for.
Not all of it goes home or in the trash, however. Some hospitals may donate the usable (i.e. sealed/sterile) leftovers to community clinics or to overseas medical missions; my mother-in-law is a nurse practitioner who goes on an annual medical mission. She collects unused supplies and brings them along, apparently with her employer’s blessing. They can’t take the write-off because the stuff’s been paid for, but otherwise perfectly good supplies aren’t going to waste.
A friend used to work in a local hospital. He always had a good supply of 12 volt gel cell batteries available for we fellow ham radio operators because the schedule called for these batteries to be replaced in items such as medication pumps and similar devices every few months. So they were changed out and the removed units were disposed of. In some cases these were backup batteries used if AC power failed. But they had to be replaced on schedule.
Batteries have a finite shelf life. There’s a point where the risk that they won’t work anymore is non-negligible, which may be acceptable if the downside of them not working is that you have to get up to change the channel, but not if the downside is that a person dies.
In certain cases, they come in contact with diseases that can’t be sterilized with normal means.
in all fairness, disposable stethoscopes are generally one to a patient during their entire hospital stay. It gets left in their room. On the other hand it is no match in quality for my Littman Cardiology II
I hate all the waste involved in the health care system. But some things are just part of “best practices in Infection Control”. When I worked as a clinic coordinator we had so much stuff that had to be discarded because of Quality Assurance and Good Manuafacturing Practice. For instance, a box of 10,000 alcohol swabs had an expiry date on them. Anything out of date had to be discared. The next lot didn’t have a date on them, so they were let to linger around longer.
We also have problems with multi use vials of injectable medication. If a glass vial has 4 mls in it, and our patient only uses 0.5 mls sometimes policy says we have to discard. Which is wasteful and a nuisance especially if it is a controlled subsance that must be recorded, like benzodiazipines, narcotics, stimulants, etc. On the other hand, if there is a shortage of that medication, then we do reuse it under special orders “Until Stock levels return to normal”.
I loved my Littman Cardiology II, I bought it with some bursary or prize money I won for having a perfect 4.0 average in first semester of nursing. Then when I was almost finished nursing school it walked away on the neck of a doctor. :smack: I never got it back. Now my current one is a lesser model, still Littman, bright pink and in a stethoscope cozy with my name all over it. 
No mistaking it for “yours”
It’s one thing for you to bring home an insulin pen that was previously used on you. But a hospital in Connecticut is dealing with possibly exposing patients to HIV and hepatitis because it reused them on different patients. (They did change the needles, but that’s not enough apparently.) Dealing with this is going to cost them a fortune.
I’ll grant you points 1 & 2, but “inefficient” and “profit driven” are mutually exclusive. If profit were the driver there would be much LESS waste. More spread of disease, perhaps, but much less waste.
Judging by this CDC breakdown of US healthcare costs (PDF) this type of ‘waste’ accounts for some of the 85.9 billion dollars spent on durable and non-durable healthcare products in 2011.
Which seems like a big number, until you compare it with the total healthcare cost of 2,700 billion dollars. The total bill for medical products (other than prescription drugs) is therefore a shade over 3% of the total costs.
My understanding is that most of the high health costs (in the US compared to other countries) can be traced back to 3 things, more or less.
[ul]
[li]We spend far more on administration and overhead[/li]
[li]We do not allow the public or private sector to use market forces to drive down prices (a lot of prices are hidden, hard to get or in non-disclosure agreements). No other market works the way US health care works. [/li]
[li]Our system is run as a fragmented fee for service system so the incentive is to provide the highest cost goods and services at most points of the system rather than the most effective or cost efficient. [/li][/ul]
I guess throwing away health stuff would fall under point 2, but as someone else said it is a small % of health spending.