Eh. Single use plastics are REALLY useful in certain areas of healthcare where sterility is important. Especially for vascular access devices. Nothing is going to beat the ability of plastic to:

1. stay sterile on a shelf for months to years at a time, so that it can safely be used to bypass 90% of a person’s immune system to give lifesaving medication and reliably produce quality samples for testing

2. do it while being flexible enough to not damage the vasculature permanently or in a way that causes enough damage / inflammation to render the access point unusable

3. Yet be resistant enough to breakdown that it’s unlikely to break off in a large enough chunk that could migrate and damage the brain heart or lungs.

And I suspect someone who works OR has a way longer and more interesting list than I do.

Now there are other areas in healthcare that plastics could be significantly reduced. The big one that occurs to me is hygiene supplies. We use a lot of single use wet wipes and bed pads with plastic backings. If we were willing to give direct care workers more time to spend with each patient they could make better use of washcloths, washable bed pads, etc.

But there are a select few use cases where I expect plastic to outperform all alternatives for the foreseeable future.