A day in the life of a nursing trailblazer

I began my nursing career back in 2008, and from day one I have been working as a theatre nurse. I love my job working in the operating theatres and at last count I have assisted at over 2000 operations.

As I once told my parents, I can think of nothing more satisfying than having my scrubs and face mask on, blood on my gloves, stress levels high and my hand inside someone’s body holding some critical instrument. Having said that, one of the first things that struck me about the operating theatre environment was the amount of wastage that occurs. It is simply appalling.

Australia’s high standards of medical care mean that once the packaging is opened and the contents are no longer sterile, the remaining unused, clean supplies can no longer be used. They are simply dumped! Similarly, instruments, equipment and furniture are thrown out every few years despite being perfectly usable.

I could not believe that these perfectly usable supplies were not being reused in some way. I clearly remember the situation that tipped me over the edge and made think I really need to do something about all this waste.

I was assisting in an orthopaedic operation back in late 2012. Before the operation, I was instructed to dump all the unused items of a very expensive joint replacement kit into the medical waste bin. On enquiring about why were these and other clean items from cancelled operations not being recycled, cleaned or put to better use, I was informed that it was just the way it was and there was no organisation dealing with this problem.

It was then that I decided to form my charity, Save Our Supplies (SOS), to collect and repurpose this ‘waste’. One way SOS provides this service is by providing special collection bins for the operating theatres of hospitals.

Clean, unused medical supplies and equipment are placed in our bins by the theatre nurses and are collected by us for repurposing. This ‘waste’ would have otherwise been dumped as landfill.

My life now is a juggling act between being a single mum looking after two school-age kids, working as a theatre nurse which puts the ‘bread on the table’ and running my charity. A typical day when I focus exclusively on SOS goes something like this:

06:00 Wake up and get the kids ready for school. I have to say, this is not my favourite part of the day — I have never been a morning person!

07:00 I head out and drop the kids at before school care. On the three days a week that I work as a theatre nurse, I am straight to the hospital to begin work. Otherwise, it is back home to begin work on the charity, and a breakfast and a strong coffee to wake me up properly!

08:00 Post-coffee, I start work on Save Our Supplies. My first call of the day is to Medline, a major medical supply company who collects our bins from the various hospitals that partner with us and take them to our storage facilities.

I used to collect the bins myself in the family car, but now that we have 13 major Brisbane hospitals supplying their clean waste, it is great to have a partner like Medline who do this for us at no cost. I let them know at each contact what hospitals are ready for collection.

09:30 I then receive an email from a nurse who wants to know when we are going to be expanding into Victoria as she is very keen to support us. She had heard about SOS on a recent TV news segment. I let her know we are hoping to be in Victoria within the next two years and would love to have her involved. Her name goes onto the list of nurses from all over Australia who want to help.

11:00 A telephone call from one of our partner hospitals lets me know they have an autoclave machine that is being replaced by a later model. It still works perfectly — would we like it? Wow!!, can you imagine how useful that could be to a rural medical centre in a country like Papua New Guinea or Cambodia? I let Medline know the details and to collect it when they visit the hospital later that week.

12:00 For most of the day I field calls from partner and prospective charities to provide support for the day-to-day operations for SOS. This process goes well into the afternoon on this day, and the next call is to Rotary’s ‘Donation in Kind’ charity. They partner with us to provide storage facilities and volunteers, and most importantly, they provide spare capacity in their foreign aid containers to ship our supplies overseas at no cost.

13:00 Today’s call is to organise a volunteer’s day next Sunday where we will sort, repackage and catalogue all the supplies. When I first started the charity, I used to do all this myself from my parents’ granny flat where I lived at the time. However, today, we collect over 20 tonnes of hospital waste each year, so it is great to have a partner like Rotary who supply volunteers to help with the sorting, repackaging and cataloguing of all these supplies.

Last year this work delivered nearly $2.0m in usable medical supplies and benefited thousands of people in desperate need of better health care. The repurposed supplies generated over 400 different types of operating theatre items plus many other specialty hospital items, like the autoclave.

17:00 I pick the kids up and begin sorting dinner, showers and general night-time activities.

Claire Lane MACN is the Founder and CEO of the not-for-profit Save Our Supplies. In August 2022, she was awarded the Health Minister’s Award for Nursing Trailblazers at the Australian College of Nursing National Nursing Forum in Darwin for her innovative nurse leadership.