| Abstrakt: |
Biomedical waste is a complete waste that is generated during the healthcare delivery process within the healthcare facilities (HCFs). There are two main types of healthcare waste; Hazardous waste (Sharps, cytotoxic, radioactive, infectious, pathological, chemical, and pharmaceutical waste) and non-hazardous waste (general waste or waste that does not pose any biological, chemical, radioactive, or physical hazard). Objective: Assessment of awareness, attitude and practices regarding Medical waste management among Healthcare professionals. Material and Methods: An institution-based cross-sectional study was deployed on 264 medical staff of Bolan Medical Complex (BMC) hospital, Quetta for assessment of Knowledge, Attitude, and Practice about medical waste management. The data was collected by a structured questionnaire of 23-item scale divided into four sections was used to collect the data which was adopted from an established medical waste management (MWM) tool. Data was entered into SPSS and scores of all variables were calculated the cutoff point was settled for the differentiation of every output variable. The ethical approval from an internal review board of Institute and permission from hospital was obtained to conduct the study. Written informed consent was taken from the every participant of the study the data was analyzed by SPSS version 20. Results: Demographics of the study shows that 137 out of 264 were females which 51.9% of the sample collected and 48.1% were male participants. Mean age of the study participants was 35.86±7.03 years, 51.5% of total participants were doctors, 33.3% nurses and the paramedical staff was 15.5%. The data was collected from all departments but the major portion of the data was from medicine (35.5%) and surgery department (25.5%). Final results shows that 174(66%) having high awareness 91(34.4%) were doctors and attitude results where 60.2%(159) were positive while 39.8%(105) were negative. The overall practices results are also given, where "Good" response was 77.3%(204) while overall response to statement of environmental enabling factors were 37.9% "Yes" only. Conclusion: This study concludes that medical waste management has not received adequate reflection in governmental hospitals, since there is inadequate and inefficient segregation, collection, transportation and storage of bio-medical waste. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
