71 Sustainably supporting mobility – Developing a walking aid re-use scheme at GOSH
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background GOSH has targeted 2031 to be net zero for direct emissions and 2035 – 2040 for indirect emissions therefore must do all it can to meet this. Walking aid re-use schemes have been introduced UK-wide as the products are durable, can be refurbished and reused repeatedly, reduce landfill waste and avoid carbon emissions from new production. The GOSH Physiotherapy Sustainability Team set out to; recognise what exists nationally, identify the current process at GOSH, then advance the provision, return and recycling of mobility aids.Method The Physiotherapy Sustainability Team attended national webinars and contacted other trusts to establish current processes and potential barriers. To ensure safety and feasibility, GOSH sustainability and estates teams were consulted and cleaning guidance was sought through Green NHS. A Smart Survey was distributed to 99 physiotherapy staff with 23 responses.Results At least 100 trusts already had a scheme and were able to share case studies and processes, including another London tertiary centre.The survey identified 26% of physiotherapy staff ‘did not accept’ returned walking aids. Of the 58% who ‘always accepted’ aids, the management of returns varied; 10% placed them in the gym, 10% the basement and 37% said ‘other’.Conclusion One quarter of physiotherapy staff did not process returned aids and processes for those that do were inconsistent. Following the survey we created a standardised pathway allowing physiotherapy staff to safely assess aids for re-use.Next steps Education will be provided to all physiotherapy staff to establish reliability, with sustainability champions identified to support the process. Advice will be given to families verbally and via posters in waiting areas. Long-term aims include; audit to evaluate the effectiveness of the pathway, including return rate, the impact on patient care and the contribution to the trust’s sustainability pledge.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.018 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".