A team of Simon Fraser University students from the Tri-Cities are well on their way to solving the problem of medical waste created by devices that can only be used once and by hospital overstocking. And their efforts have been recognized on the global stage.
Gleneagle secondary grad Kimberley Venn, who attends the Beedie School of Business, and science students Alec Yu, a Pinetree grad, and Iman Baharmand, who attended Riverside secondary, recently won the Global Challenge, an international competition at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom where students explore and present ideas around social and environmental change.
In their presentation, the SFU team looked at the prevalence of single-use medical implements and the problem of overstocking supplies at hospitals, as well as the social and environmental impact of that waste. They then highlighted solutions implemented in other countries and suggested ways to deal with the issue in Canadian hospitals.
“We decided to tackle our problem from a broad, issue-centric direction,” said Yu in a press release. “This allowed us to meet so many different people, from doctors to nurses to purchasers, who believed in what we were doing and generously offered their support.”
The team was one of only two from Canada in the competition that featured 14 teams from five continents. They won $5,000 in prizes and were invited to return to the University of Oxford to participate in two conferences on social entrepreneurship over the next year.
Venn, Yu and Baharmand met at SFU’s Health Change Lab program. It’s a collaboration between the Beedie School of Business and the Faculty of Health Science that challenges students to find solutions for community health issues while being mentored by stakeholders in the community.
“Each week we were challenged to explore different perspectives and encouraged to develop a broad range of skills from a variety of disciplines,” said Baharmand. “We learned the fundamentals of making social change happen.”
