Insights of healthcare waste management practices in Vietnam
- PDF / 1,051,044 Bytes
- 13 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 44 Downloads / 197 Views
ENVIRONMENTAL AND ENERGY MANAGEMENT
Insights of healthcare waste management practices in Vietnam Huyen T. T. Dang 1
&
Hung V. Dang 2 & Tuong Q. Tran 3
Received: 12 November 2019 / Accepted: 13 September 2020 # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Nowadays, together with the economic development, public health activities have gained substantial attention with increasing number of hospitals during the past decades. A multi-method approach involving site visits, questionnaires, and interviews, in combination with secondary data revealed that the healthcare waste (HCW) generation, varied with different specialties (general or pediatric/ obstetric hospitals) and different level of hospitals (central, provincial, district levels). The HCW generation from different kinds of surveyed hospitals varied from 0.8 to 1.0 kg/bed/day for domestic waste, 0.15 to 0.25 kg/bed/day for infectious and hazardous waste, and less than 0.1 kg/bed/day for recycled waste. Only 94.3% of central hospitals, 92% of provincial hospitals, and 82% of district hospitals complied with national regulation in hazardous medical waste treatment. For healthcare wastewater treatment, the actual operating rates were 91%, 73%, and 50% for central, provincial, and district hospitals, respectively. The cost for HCW management accounted for only 10–15% of the total budget allocated for the medical facilities. Most of the provincial hospitals spent about $0.2–$0.4/bed/year for HCW management. This is the root cause of ineffective HCW management. Keywords Healthcare solid waste . Wastewater treatment . Waste management cost . Policy compliance
Introduction In general, poor healthcare waste management (HCWM) could result in negative impacts to the environment and community health (Sharma and Gupta 2017; Romero and Carnero 2017; Mardani et al. 2019; Alam and Qiao 2019). The most commonly noted issues in HCWM are often unsafe disposal of wastes, occupational health, and unsafety for healthcare workers. Safe disposal of HCW involves key stages such as segregation, collection and storage, treatment, transport, safe disposal, waste mitigation, and recycling (WHO 2014). Despite its importance, the proper management and disposal of healthcare waste are significant challenges in many developing countries (Aung et al. 2019). A study in Nanjing, China, revealed that only Responsible Editor: Philippe Garrigues * Huyen T. T. Dang [email protected] 1
Faculty of Environmental Engineering, National University of Civil Engineering, Hanoi, Vietnam
2
Department of International Cooperation, Ministry of Health, Hanoi, Vietnam
3
Department of Information Technology, Ministry of Health, Hanoi, Vietnam
73% of the hospitals in the area conducted the segregation, 20% used unqualified staffs for collection, 93.3% had storage area, and 93.3% had conducted training (Yong et al. 2009). In Dhaka City, Bangladesh, untrained waste handlers, inadequate personal protection equipment (PPE), inadequate storage rooms, no segregation, lack of management a
Data Loading...
