KPJ Puteri bags Healthcare Asia Award for innovative waste management system

The cost-saving and pro-environment project has won various awards since 2020.

KPJ Healthcare Berhad has been known as the largest network of private healthcare providers in Malaysia since 1993. Its private hospital, KPJ Puteri Specialist Hospital (KPJ Puteri), has since been one of the institutions that have placed KPJ’s corporate social responsibility missions forward.

In KPJ Puteri, scheduled waste consists of discarded drugs, discarded materials contaminated with blood and its derivatives, and discarded chemical containers. Its discarded chemicals alone have risen by 70% from 2018 to 2019 and are expected to increase further with the increase in activity over the years.

Thus, the management of waste has become a general acute problem that requires immediate attention from all lines of its workers.

To address this, an e-Scheduled Waste Management System (SWeMS) was launched to reduce the administrative work that comes with managing waste and to make sure that the processes are compliant with existing laws.

SWeMS is user-friendly, allowing every scheduled waste produced to be registered with detailed descriptions such as waste producer, the amount produced, and disposal time, and labelled with the image of the scheduled waste.

The unique feature of SWeMS is the triggering alarm to alert the staff of the number of storage days as per the regulated period. This received positive feedback from end-users after it was successfully implemented for its accessibility and real-time system.

The system helped reduce up to 57% of its storage, and additional cost savings on human resources generated approximately US$6,247.29 per year.

Similarly, rather than indenting record books monthly for scheduled waste records, the hospital notes that about US$4,026.03 was saved per year when SWeMS was implemented.

For this innovation, KPJ Puteri was given the Management Innovation of the Year - Malaysia award in the recently concluded Healthcare Asia Awards.

This year, with its theme of Recognising Trailblazing Initiatives in the Healthcare Sector, the awards program aims to honour hospitals, clinics, and other healthcare providers that have risen above the challenges and made a remarkable impact on their patients, most especially amidst the massive disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

In giving this award, the judging panel took into consideration three achievements of the project. First is that it received a Gold award during Malaysian National Convention on Team Excellence for Annual Productivity and Innovation Conference & Exposition (APIC) 2020.

It also won the Excellence Award in Asian Hospital Management Award 2020 for the Most Advanced Healthcare Technology category. Lastly, it received the Excellent award in the 46th International Convention on Quality Control Circles at Hyderabad India in 2021.

KPJ Puteri is also noted for sharing the system and for presenting it in the Regional Team Excellence convention under Quality Control Initiatives organized by Malaysian Productivity Corporation.

Being beneficial to KPJ Puteri in terms of cost saving, protecting the environment, and abiding by the law, its top management decided to register SWeMS in the Intellectual Property Corporation of Malaysia as the pioneer of its kind.