Healthcare Waste Management for primary health facilities
Staff at The Centre for Renewable Energy, Appropriate Technology and Environment (CREATE) have been providing medical waste disposal professional assistance to the World Health Organization, UNICEF, PATH and other International Agencies since 1980. CREATE manufactures Incinerators and Solar melters for use in low economic areas. It provides best practice guidelines, and undertakes technical development of waste disposal technologies.
Mismanagement of healthcare waste puts healthcare workers, patients and the community at risk from pathogens and from pollution due to burning in open pits or badly maintained incineration equipment. Primary health facilities require health care waste management systems to minimize the risk of contamination of patients, health workers and the general public from infectious waste. In this regard, Waste Disposal Unit (WDU) with Small Scale Incinerator (SSI), when used according to Best Practices, can be a cheap and comparatively less hazardous way of disposing of health care waste.
A WDU was constructed and tested at the Pondicherry Institute of Medical Sciences. The experience, coupled with data collected from field trials in Kenya, Burkina Faso, Senegal and Indonesia, enabled the current "Best Practices" for a Waste Disposal Unit to be formulated. These best practice guidelines provide clear technical specifications and engineering drawings for each component, available as a WDU pre-packaged kit. The guidelines have been published by PATH and can be downloaded from this site.
Good Health Care Waste Management (HCWM) helps to improve hygiene and operational efficiency in primary health facilities. It also reduces the environmental pollution that arises from poor waste segregation and destruction practices.
HCWM ensures:
- Safe containment of infectious and non-infectious waste at the location where it is produced;
- Separation of waste into categories so that it is processed appropriately;
- Safe and prompt transport of contained waste to a point of temporary storage prior to processing; and
- Proper processing of
waste according to WHO-recommended practices.
The WDU provides an affordable appropriate technology solution for syringe and medical waste disposal, which improves on the waste destruction methods already in practice at most locations. Incineration is expensive and demanding, requires investment in an incinerator, waste segregation, management and training BUT
Small scale auto-combustion incinerators are safer, more effective and more environmentally acceptable
- Reduced hazardous emissions including Greenhouse gases
- Increased levels of destruction of medical waste
- Increased safety and less risks
- Improved scope for management control
- Simple low cost drum or brick incinerators have
- Relatively poor destruction efficiency
- No destruction of many chemicals and pharmaceuticals
- Massive emission of black smoke, particulates, and toxic flue gases
- Open pit burning: cheap, toxic emissions and waste scatter
- Low temperature burning: is low cost, but most dangerous solution due to pollution and incomplete destruction