Abandoned crutches

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