Lost crutches are the headache of hospital bosses everywhere, costing the NHSup to £50,000 a year to replace.
However, a Sussex University product design student has devised a solution that could help prevent such losses.
’Each pair of crutches costs the NHS £20, but more than 50 per cent never get returned. I’ve worked through several prototypes to strengthen all the different stress points to make a recyclable crutch that’s even stronger than the original but at a much reduced cost,’ said student designer Alex Williams.
Not only are the crutches cheap to make, but they are designed to be recycled; patients could simply put the crutches in their recycling box instead of returning them to a hospital.
Williams’s crutches can be viewed at the Sussex product design student’s end-of-year show at The Basement on Kensington Street, Brighton, on 18-20 June.
Sussex product design student Alex Williams holds up a pair of his recyclable crutches
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Where will all the raw materials come from for the manufacturing process? How will they be transported to the factory and what is going to be done with the various scrap and residues?