Assessment of Knowledge on Health Care Waste Management among Health Care Professionals
Published: 2021-07-26
Page: 167-170
Issue: 2021 - Volume 4 [Issue 1]
Premalatha Paulsamy *
College of Nursing for Girls, King Khalid University, Khamis Mushayit, Asir Province, Saudi Arabia.
Shadia Hamoud Alshahrani
College of Nursing, Mahalah Branch for Girls, Asir Province, Saudi Arabia.
Krishnaraju Venkatesan
Department of Pharmacology, College of Pharmacy, King Khalid University, Abha, Asir Province, Saudi Arabia.
Pranave Sethuraj
Vee Care College of Nursing Chennai, India.
Absar Ahmed Qureshi
Department of Pharmacology, College of Pharmacy, King Khalid Universiy, Abha, Asir Province, Saudi Arabia.
*Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Abstract
Medical waste is contagious and potentially dangerous. It causes substantial health risks to the environment and requires special treatment and care before being disposed of. With an ever-increasing number of hospitals, clinics, and diagnostic laboratories, the problem is getting worse. The goal of this study was to see how well health workers in a tertiary care hospital knew about health care waste management (HWM). Sixty health care professionals (HCPs), including nurses, pharmacists, lab technicians, and non-medical health workers, were chosen using a purposive sampling technique. The researchers created a self-administered questionnaire based on the WHO guide on the health care waste management protocol. Nurses had the most expertise of biomedical waste management (64.58%), followed by lab technicians (46.41%), and non-medical health workers had the least (38.73%). Colour coding awareness was the greatest with the features among the survey participants. At p =0.05, the amount of understanding of health-care waste management was highly associated to profession, level of education, and receiving health-care waste management training. The study suggests that healthcare professionals, particularly nursing personnel, require ongoing training, which should be made mandatory.
Keywords: Knowledge, health care waste management, health care professionals, nurses, pharmacists, lab technicians, non – medical health workers