Injection Molded Plastic in Healthcare: How Plastic Medical Supplies Support Improved Outcomes
Everyday medical supplies may not make headlines like Nobel Prize-winning breakthrough treatments, but they’re the foundation every healthcare system relies on to keep patients and staff safe. Other option: Since the mid-19th century, plastic has been a top choice in the medical industry. For the last 70 years, plastic has been the material of choice, revolutionizing how care is delivered and changing patient outcomes for the better.
From medicine bottles to sutures, plastic injection molding is helping bring safer, more affordable, and more innovative solutions to healthcare. Here’s how:
How Plastic Medical Supplies Save Lives
Before plastic, glass and metal were the most commonly used materials on the hospital floor. Naturally, this created a number of problems. For example, glass needles were easily breakable and could spill life-saving medication, while reused, unsterilized metal tools could increase the risk of spreading infections from patient to patient. Thankfully, materials science created a better solution for care teams.
Advantages of Precision Injection Molding for Medical Plastics
Today, medical plastics adhere to the highest standards in performance, reliability, biocompatibility, and more. And for pharma companies, injection molding provides an efficient way to create plastic supplies and devices at scale, with added benefits like:
Potential for Single-Use Design
Medical plastics can be highly flexible, and can be designed specifically for single-use applications. Using disposable medical supplies in place of reusable items can substantially reduce the risk of Healthcare-associated infections (HAIs) to patients and staff alike because they are often sterilized and packaged in a sterile space before use.
Not all plastic medical products are single-use though. Some are made to be reused and cleaned many times throughout their usable life.
Reduced Cost
Healthcare costs are rising, and companies are feeling the pressure. Fortunately, injection molding is much more affordable to scale compared to metal or glass and can create significant long-term savings at the per-unit level.
Consistent Quality & Design Flexibility
Plastic injection molding may be a more cost-effective option, but it doesn’t come at the expense of quality. High-precision injection molding ensures consistent quality in every part, and the flexibility of plastic allows for more complexity in product design.
Lightweight Options
Plastic-made medical supplies are lighter in weight and often smaller than their metal and glass counterparts. This not only saves on material cost but reduces waste. We use a variety of molding techniques with resin selection as a part of our patented lightweighting process to produce lighter products with less plastic while maintaining strict quality standards.
Cleanroom Manufacturing
Many medical supplies require strict hygiene standards to be met during their manufacturing process. When sterilization isn’t enough, cleanrooms offer spaces specifically designed to limit products’ exposure to contaminants during the manufacturing process.
Our class 7 and 8 cleanrooms are FDA-registered and meet GMP and ISO 9001/13485 standards, and feature 100% in-line inspections along with other comprehensive quality management systems.
Antimicrobial Properties
Every year, more than 1.7 million healthcare-acquired infections occur in hospitals, leading to almost 100,000 deaths per year. To further reduce the chance of these infections, antimicrobial components can be incorporated into plastic resin, creating antimicrobial compounds that can inhibit bacterial growth by up to 99.99%.
Pharmaceutical Incorporation
At Alltrista, we are able to incorporate drugs and other active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) into plastic molded parts in controlled parts per million dose levels. This specialized process makes it possible to build controlled delivery systems in medical devices that release a set amount of medicine over time.
Alltrista - Leaders in High Precision Materials Science
Medical injection molding requires the highest level of trust, precision, and quality to make an impact. At Alltrista, we’ve worked hard to perfect our patented processes and are proud to be a trusted partner to pharma companies across the US, UK, and Puerto Rico.
When unique part requirements or stringent cleanroom standards need to be met, our materials science experts are here to give you unprecedented solutions. This is the Alltrista difference, and it’s what keeps our customers coming back again and again.
We’d love to help bring your medical devices to life. Reach out today to speak to one of our specialists.
