Hospital gloves

While in the Emergency Department of a hospital on the weekend, I noticed something curious: boxes of sterile gloves, still 30-50% full, being thrown away and replaced with full boxes in treatment rooms.

The directive was clear—gloves must never run out. But the system designed to ensure this created an ongoing waste problem that was being ignored.

Here’s the math: A busy Emergency Department within a 200 bed hospital can go through at least 50,000 gloves a month. At $30 a box for 100 gloves, that’s roughly $180,000 a year. If 30% are wasted, $54,000 is literally trashed annually.

Why? A wall dispenser design that only holds one box at a time which forces premature replacements.

The real problem isn’t the gloves. It’s a system that solves one issue (availability) while ignoring another (waste).

A better dispenser, holding two boxes and ensuring rotation, could eliminate this waste while keeping gloves available when needed.

What I wondered was whether this problem was on anyones radar? Was waste normalised as part of the culture, embedded within processes?

When no one hunts for problems, inefficiency becomes invisible—and expensive.

What waste is hiding in plain sight in your business? Who’s hunting for it?