At the beginning of April, Maurice Kloos, a student from Hogeschool Rotterdam, and Jasper Klasen, ESCH-R PhD student, began working on an ambitious task: mapping the complete material flow within the Interventional Cardiology department. To achieve this, Maurice and Jasper are conducting a detailed waste audit: collecting and analyzing surgical waste to identify which products are used, and in what quantities. This audit marks the beginning of a larger effort to map over 100 individual procedures!

The first weeks focused on refining the workflow. Initially, a single procedure took nearly nine hours to process. Thanks to their efforts and iterative improvements, the team has now streamlined the process to just one hour per procedure.

In the early days of the project, several members of the ESCH-R team provided valuable support, including ESCH-R Postdoc Ayşegül Özçelik, WP5 Lead and Projectboard member Jan Carel Diehl, PhD students Shalvi Thakur, Heidi Annala, Chang-Lung Tsai, and Paula Götz. Their hands-on involvement was instrumental in getting the research off to a smooth and productive start.