Abstract

BIOMEDICAL WASTE FROM HOSPITALS: AN ENVIRONMENTAL HAZARD AND ITS MANAGEMENT

Pingale Prashant L.*, Boraste Sahebrao S. and Amrutkar Sunil S.

ABSTRACT

Medical care is an essential for life and health, but the wastes generated from medical activities represent a real difficulty of living nature and human world. Inappropriate management of waste generated in health care facilities causes a direct health impact on the public, the health care workers and on the environment every day, comparatively large amount of potentially communicable, infectious and hazardous waste are generated in the health care hospitals and facilities around the world. Effective waste disposal can be achieved only by considering the various components of the waste management system and this should be made an integral part of hospital setting up and designing. Hospital is a place of enormous, a place to serve the patient. Hospital wastes pose a significant impact on health and environment. Proper and suitable waste management strategy is needed to ensure health and environmental safety. Children, adults and animals all have the potential to come into contact with these wastes which may pose severe health risks to them. In this review article, we have highlighted risk of biomedical waste to human health, WHO medical waste categories, general categories of biomedical waste, fundamental principles of a waste management programme, tools for drafting the waste management plan, implementation of the waste management plan and categories of bio-medical waste and the various disposal technologies to be adopted that there is an urgent need for raising awareness and education on medical waste issues.

Keywords: Medical, management, hospital, waste management, disposal.