Esther Schroeder¹, Sonia Chanchlani^1
1Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine

As a significant contributor to Australia's carbon emissions, the healthcare sector has an opportunity to reduce it's contributions through the appropriate handling of waste and innovative approaches to waste streams. The Clinical Forensic Medicine unit at the Victorian Institute of Medicine undertook a waste audit of it's Forensic Medical Examination Kits and Contamination Reduction Kits used in sexual assault forensic medical examinations. The audit was complimented by a co-design approach with frontline staff to generate waste management recommendations. Staff engagement in this issue was high and showed a commitment to improving the handling of waste. The audit of waste from 10 cases identified commonly unused items within the kits, and found that staff had inconsistent approaches to how the waste was disposed of after examinations. In a focus group with clinicians, recommendations were generated to educate staff around which waste streams to use, identify which items may be kept to be reused or donated, and provide the audit information to management for future design iterations of the kits.