Hazardous Health Care Waste Management In Health Care Settings (Research Paper Sample)

Hazardous Healthcare Waste Management in Healthcare Settings
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CHAPTER ONE: Background Information and Literature Review
1 Introduction
Health facilities are places that provide health care services to patients; however, they can diffuse diseases and cause serious health problems to people and adverse effects on the environment. They include clinics, outpatient care centers, hospitals, veterinary or dental, medical laboratories and specialized care centers. Medical wastes are any wastes that contain infectious materials or constituents that are potentially contagious (Chartier, 2015). Hazardous waste materials pretenses health risks to patients and people who handle them as well to the environment. Hazardous medicinal wastes are contagious and posture severe pressures to personal health and environmental. It needs proper handling, managing, storage, and disposal, (Blenkharn 2015, p. 543). Hospital wastes are alienated into two sets; Clinical hospital wastes and over-all hospital wastes (non-clinical). Clinical wastes contain harmful wastes, which constitute 10-25% of the total wastes formed in health services, and contains sharps, pharmaceuticals, infectious, radioactive, pathological, genotoxic residues plus chemicals. General residues include bagged wastes, spillage in the health facilities (Farzadika, 2016).
Keywords
Hazardous – unsafe, risk or dangerous that might cause harm to people or environment.
Healthcare waste- surplus materials generated due to health facility activities. Also, refer to medical wastes.
1 Literature Review
Hazardous Medical wastes are any solid wastes produced in treatment, vaccination of people or animals or during diagnosis, related to research, testing and production of biological specimens from health care facilities (Nema 2015, p. 34). Infectious wastes include; pathological wastes, human blood wastes and products of blood, used sharp objects, culture stock of contagious agents, contaminated animal autopsy that had been contaminated due to direct interaction with infectious and wastes starting with laboratories such as medical, corpses and body fragments, pathological , surgical treatment and pharmaceutical (Ojuolape 2016, p. 50).
Management of medical wastes rural health services
Most hospitals separate medicinal wastes into three categories (Liu 2015, p. 938). The conventional way is by use of the three-bin system to accommodate wastes. Highly infectious wastes are placed inside a red bin, Infectious inside a yellow bin and general wastes inside a black bin. Sharps are composed of safety boxes. A subsequent study carried out by World Health Organization (Tayor, 2014), this can be deliberated as;
* Sources of wastes
Waste weighing is prepared simultaneously in seven days to acquire the tendency of the week’s waste generation. It is of great significance by way of picturing out the number of medical wastes produced in health facilities to plan to manage them.
* Minimizing Wastes
Waste Minimization of medical wastes is one of the necessary plans considered in the handling of the health facilities’ wastes in proper ways.
* Containers of wastes
A significant number of health facilities engendering sharps uses 5-liter boxes of sharps, and some use plastic sharps containers of 2-liters. In the case of non-sharps wastes, 10 to 30-liter bins are commonly used. Nevertheless, the invention of buckets and carton boxes to be applied instead of waste bins have been detected in some of the healthcare facilities in rural areas.
Treatment of wastes, Storage, and their Transportation
In most rural health care facilities, wheelbarrows are used for transporting wastes within the facility premises; other facilities use trolleys. Using wheelbarrows has been discouraged as it leads to spillage of the residues on the way. Recommendations for transporting wastes within hospitals would be trolleys separate from ones that contain infectious wastes.
Medical wastes are stored in specific refuse storage rooms, which should be fenced, and their entry restricted from unauthorized personnel. However, in some health facilities, these rooms have been observed to be disused, while some places have leaking roofs.
The most commonly used technique in treating wastes in most health facilities is by incineration by use of functional combustion. Other ways of managing wastes are by use of composite pits in the case of non-clinical biodegradable wastes and shredders.
Health hazards posed by hazardous medical wastes to people and the environment
Poor management of hazardous medical wastes leads to public and occupation health risks. Waste handlers, health workers, haulers and the public are in great danger of being infected with these wastes. Medical wastes lead to contamination of water, soil and air, which may affect the ecological system (Chawla 2016, p. 254). If medical waste is not disposed of properly, community members around a rural health facility may collect the wastes like syringes and resell the materials that lead to severe diseases such as AIDS, Hepatitis B, and SARS. Improper disposal of medical wastes to the environment has an enormous impact on the entire life cycle (Thankur 2015, p. 860). Medical waste pollutants like heavy metals create inconvenience to the surrounding, and their accumulation in the soil affects the plant. This may also result in contamination of groundwater hence decreasing the quality of fresh water in the environment.
Knowledge of Medical Handlers
Knowledge of personnel involved in hazardous waste management is essential and includes knowing the categories of medical wastes; risks associated medical wastes and proper ways of handling and disposal methods. This personnel comprises medical officers, nurses, public health officers and medical waste workers (Pai, 2015). According to (Windfeld 2015), one of the steps recommended for improving medical waste management is to raise the awareness on the risks that are associated to health facility waste and of harmless sound practices among medical waste handlers.
Challenges encountered by healthcare facilities in hazardous medical waste management
The maintainable management of the medical wastes has continued to generate at a high rate of public concern due to problems of health-related with exposure of people to high-risk waste from health facilities (Gupta 2015, p. 104). The quantity and nature of these materials generated, institutional practices about most perfect ways of managing the wastes; water recycling and segregation are quite poorly examined and recorded in various countries despite health risks posed by the wastes due to improper handling (Adegbith, 2014).
Medical residues are a unique kind of wastes as they frequently contain constituents that might be unsafe and can lead to ill health to people who are exposed (Caniato 2015). Some studies have indicated that improper handling of medical wastes and their disposal leads to high health risks to workers who may directly meet them, most likely children and scavengers. This can lead to diseases like HIV/AIDS and hepatitis (Chopra 2017, p. 65). According to (Ojuolape, 2016), roughly 9-17 million new-fangled cases of Hepatitis B infection, 2.4- 4.8 million cases of Hepatitis C in addition 80,0 00-16000 cases of HIV. This is mostly because of unsafe injections and most properly improper waste managing techniques each year.
Healthcare waste streams during segregation and management are usually small in their quantity. (Chudasama 2017, p. 21). Wastes that are generated in the facilities most of them are treated as a regular municipal solid exception of a particular portion of the wastes that require special treatment like the pathological wastes, sharps and other highly infectious wastes from biological agents, chemicals, and pharmaceutical hazardous wastes. They require proper handling of their packaging, transportation, storage, and disposal.
Most of the facilities lack segregation measures in managing the hazardous and in hazardous wastes poses a great problem in the handling of these wastes in the facility. The absence of laws and regulation in some facilities indicates a challenge in managing the wastes in collection and transportation. Some facilities lack proper equipment for waste treatment, storage, and disposal. Inadequate protective measures offered by the facility may lead to serious health concerns to people. Some subordinate staff members lack knowledge and skills in the management of healthcare wastes due to insufficient training offered by the facility hence leading to poor healthcare waste managing facilities.
1.2 Study Justification
Globally, governments are striving to come up with the most appropriate ways of reducing communicable disease outbreaks among populations and in such way attempt to safeguard the health of people to keep them disease free. Inadequate means of medical waste handling can be disastrous to the public and the environment (Bdour, 2014).
In the year 2010, World Health Organization estimated a world level accident due to harps that resulted to 66000 cases infected with Hepatitis C and 200-5000 circumstances of HIV infections among workers of health facilities in rural areas. Most of the rural health facilities imply to management to these medical wastes is not to standard level due to improper disposal mechanisms also due to lack of machinery for managing of the wastes (Josh, 2015).
In reaction to this, the existing hazardous medical wastes management should be resolved through adequate research to enhance medical waste management techniques, skills and knowledge to handlers as well as challenges encountered by the management processes in the rural health facilities.
1.3 Research Questions
1 What are medical, hazardous waste managing tec...