A SOMERSET surgeon has invented an eco-friendly urine collection method, saving the NHS thousands of pounds.

Nick Burns-Cox, a consultant urologist with the Somerset NHS Foundation Trust, has created a brand new biodegradable pulp ‘Pee in Pot’ (PIP) to collect urine rather than the usual plastic.

The innovation, which has taken 10 years of tests, prototypes and studies to get right, is now available for NHS organisations across the country to start using.

Nick explained how it all began when he was running a clinic in the outpatients department at Chard Community Hospital and needed to test a patient’s urine to check for an infection.

He said: “The ward manager asked me how she was supposed to get a urine sample from a patient into the 10ml urine collection tube the labs needed, which is about as big as your finger.

“In order to get the urine in the 10ml, we were asking patients to urinate in a sterile bowl, which was syringed into a 30ml tube, sent to the lab, with a laboratory technician then needing to pipette the urine into a 10ml plastic tube for analysis.

“Not only was it wasting time, but it was wasting materials. Lots of single use plastic was being used for every collection. I saw the problem and knew we needed to make something that was fit for purpose and better for our environment.”

Nick worked with his colleagues, talking to a variety of patients, healthcare assistants, nurses, medics and lab colleagues to see if he could find a solution.

As the PiP is made from white pulp, it can be flushed in a macerator, rather than plastic, which is incinerated – making it seven times more environmentally friendly, compared with collecting urine in sterile plastic bowls. Just the reduction in plastic incineration will save the trust around £300 for every 21,000 sterile bowls previously used.