Plastic medical tubing may not be your best option

Multiform Tubes Ltd offers a professional and reliable service that focuses on tube manipulation. For years, we have given our support to clients who need specialist tubing. Our team uses their skills and knowledge to create products that can suit each client’s needs with ease. This includes applications in many industries.

Tube manipulationMedical technology is advancing all the time. For one, we can see big developments in new minimally invasive processes. As all of this is happening, designers of medical devices need smaller diameter medical tubes. These are ones that are more sophisticated and cost efficient. As part of this they are looking at which materials are the best.

Metal tubing has been a mainstay of this industry for years. One of the main reasons is because tube manipulation can help create complex products to suit an array of needs. However, the use of plastic is on the rise. It is true that people view these materials as cheap and flexible. However, many myths about them exist. They can reveal that plastics might not be a good substitute for metal after all.

Disposable

The first myth states that disposable medical tubing is the way forward. Plastics may be practical for single-use applications. Yet, the fact is that healthcare creates as much as 25 pounds of waste every day per patient. As a result, there is a worry about the impact and cost of disposing of so much waste each year. Apart from this, the environmental footprint widens to the manufacturing process too. There are clearly sustainability and environmental concerns here.

Easier to reuse

Another myth is that plastic tubing is as easy to reuse as metal products. People might propose that you can reuse and re-sterilise it like you can with metal. There is something you must remember though. When you reuse medical products, the material has to maintain its resistances, strength, and rigidity. They must do this even when you expose them to cleaning processes, sterilisation, and disinfectants. It is possible for you to re-sterilise metal medical tubing using a number of strategies. However, plastic ones might not be able to endure them and keep the attributes.

Strong but not quite that strong

The final myth is that these plastic tubes are as strong as metal ones. There are a few high performance polymers that can offer a level of strength that is comparable to metals. However in most cases metal is still more robust and stronger. This makes it perfect for applications that need high pressure fluid flow and a high amount of structural strength.

Our tube manipulation work is efficient and accurate

At Multiform Tubes Ltd we have the ability to perform alterations on various types of tubing. Our team can use many techniques to get the right results. We even have the knowledge to work on different metals, such as aluminium, steel, brass, and hydraulic tubes. We are able to do this because we make use of the best equipment.

So, if you require our tube manipulation, please get in touch with us. We can work with clients who need medical tubing as well as people from many other industries. Our goal is to offer the best products every time, even for tricky needs.