Virtuous circle

With his innovative company, Oliver Hunt is saving hospitals money and reducing their waste

- CAITLIN SYKES

Oliver Hunt's company is diverting more than a tonne of waste a week from New Zealand hospitals by helping them reuse "single-use" medical devices.

Hunt spends his working hours as founder and owner of a remanufacturing business, but in his free time, he's in the outdoors: running, mountain biking, skiing and surfing. They're two worlds, but in the eyes of the Christchurch entrepreneur, they're aligned.

In 2017, Hunt founded Medsalv, he says, to make healthcare more sustainable by not only reducing hospitals' waste and costs, but also creating environmental benefits by keeping products out of landfill and reducing carbon emissions.

"I didn't want to go out mountain biking and surfing and skiing and then feel like when I went to work, I was doing something that was incongruous with those things. And I'd always wanted a business I could sink my teeth into, something that aligned with me and was a good place to learn."

Hospitals use a number of devices labelled for single use, and in some cases, this is imperative to ensure patient safety. However, others have been labelled as such because the original manufacturer hasn't done the necessary testing or provided the data required to label them "reusable", when they can actually be safely reused under certain conditions.

It's these devices, which would ordinarily be sent straight to landfill once used, that Hunt's company collects from hospitals. Medsalv then cleans, tests, inspects and repackages them before returning them to hospitals for safe clinical reuse - typically at a lower price than the original products.

The process is called remanufacturing because the returned products are individually tested to perform as new, and it's done at Medsalv's ISO-accredited facility.