Healthcare Waste Management Practices in Al Leith Hospital, Saudi Arabia

Abstract

Health Care Waste: According to WHO report, the term healthcare waste is defined as all the waste generated by health-care establishments, research facilitates, laboratories, hospitals, clinics, medical research centers, pharmaceutical manufacturing plants, pharmacies, blood banks, veterinary healthcare centers and home healthcare activities (Prüss et al. 2013; Alhadlaq, 2014) .Objectives: The main objectives of this study are to assessment of the medical waste management practices of Al leith Hospital, to identify the present medical waste handling practices training and vaccination against hepatitis B at the Al leith hospital. Materials and Methods: This is a descriptive cross-sectional study was conducted to examine the medical waste management practices was conducted in Al leith hospital in Al leith, KSA from March to April 2019. Waste management officers or infection control officers of hospital were interviewed, to provide the following data; the number of inpatients administered on a monthly basis, vaccination hepatitis B, waste training and the storage area. The questionnaire was designed on the basis of the national regulatory framework for medical waste management and the World Health Organization’s rapid assessment tool (WHO 2004), observations were made of departments, wards, related internal facilities such as storage sites, containers and tools, handling practices of medical staff common practices and detailed issues on medical waste management in hospital. SPSS Analysis Analyses of data was performed by the use of Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS) version.17 Software. Results: the total waste generation rate in Al leith hospital was about 2.9 kg/bed/day and it within the range of WHO, The result revealed that there is designated storage area in Al leith hospital, almost all departments 60.0% of the hospital surveyed practiced some sort of medical waste segregation, 70.0% of the health care staff were immunized against common communicable diseases, while in 3.3%, they were not and 26.7% do not remember. The result of our study revealed that there was only 63.3% of workers had trained, Conclusion: The results also showed that segregation of various medical waste types in the hospital has not been conducted properly. 70.0% of the health care staff were immunized against common communicable diseases, while in 3.3%, they were not and 26.7% do not remember. The study revealed the need for training and capacity building programs of all employees involved in the medical waste management .Recommendation: Improve the properly segregation of medical waste, in addition to establishing training programs on proper waste management for all healthcare workers and full coverage immunized against common communicable diseases.

Keywords: waste, healthcare, hospital, KSA

DOI: 10.7176/JSTR/5-12-30