Reducing waste from printing

A Quality Improvement project has been set up by the Financial Viability Team to reduce waste related to printing. Sarah Barnett, Financial Viability Programme Manager, is leading a programme composed of three Quality Improvement projects in Corporate Services, Recovery College in Bedford and the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service (CAMHS) in London. The team is leading the deployment of new printers and the Trust has taken the set-up of the new contract as an opportunity to review the way we print. “We know that there is a lot of waste there. People are printing a lot of things in colour when they don’t need to and colour is four times the price of a page printed in black and white”, says Sarah.

Sarah Barnett – Financial Viability Programme Manager

The projects are looking at printing habits and improving communication and storage processes, among other things. While also exploring a reduction in the number of printers and changing their location, which will involve reducing the number of personal printers by 30%. Printers will now be centrally located for all staff to be able to access.

An outsourced colour printing solution is also now available with a turnaround time within 24 hours. “It is more cost-efficient for the Trust to outsource our printing to a company that has giant machines and can operate quickly and efficiently in terms of cost. That is better cost for us than deploying a lot of colour devices with high maintenance cost”, added Sarah.

The new contract has already resulted in savings of £2 million and the aim is to reduce the volume of printing by 20% across the Trust. The three services running the projects were identified as having very high volumes of printing and colour being a key component compared with other sites. Initial meetings have been held at both Recovery College and CAMHS sites and project teams are being set-up. The first Corporate project team meeting took place in late July and a Driver Diagram was generated.

Since the projects started, project teams have been communicating with services directly about reducing the use of colour printing. Information about the new printing service is also being made available on the Intranet and will be shared more widely across the Trust soon.