Healthcare Waste Report - Environment Health

CONCLUSION
Evidently, healthcare waste management is a
subject of concern among all developing
member countries of the TWGSHW. Though
some countries are ambitious about taking
healthcare waste management progressively,
they either lack knowledge, strategies,
legislations, budgets or a mix of all. As
mentioned in the earlier sections of this
report, some simple management practices,
presented in this chapter, when directly
replicated with little modification to suit the
local needs, can yield striking results. For
example, the waste segregation at source and
recycling initiatives of Hospital Lam Wah Ee,
Malaysia provides an easily replicable model
for any hospital of similar scale in any Asian
country, given the commonality in waste
composition and generation. Conversely, the
recycling of used syringes in a hospital at
Pakistan turns out to be a red alert for an
inattentive case of healthcare waste disposal.
Technical difficulties in treatment are assumed
to be complicated and deliberated to be the
foremost obstacle in healthcare waste disposal.
Real time examples where changes in
collection and segregation of the waste have
enormously reduced the amount of waste
requiring ultimate treatment. A mere change
in the practice with little or no investment
could eventually result in a significant
reduction in the final treatment cost, for
example the case of hospitals in Europe
provided earlier.
Healthcare waste management experiences in
India, such as the Biomedical Waste
Management Rules, biomedical waste
management in the national capital Delhi and
the training programme offered by IGNOU
are all inspiring and open avenues for further
regional collaboration and knowledge
exchange.
Knowing very well, that the developing
TWGSHW member countries are often faced
with budget limitations, guidelines from IFC
have been provided to present a picture of
how investment agencies look at financing
healthcare and healthcare waste management
projects.
In essence, this chapter has been structured to
provide a bird’s eye view of healthcare waste
happenings, not only in the region but across
the world. The spirit of the chapter lies in
understanding the factors that determine
successful healthcare waste management
through the few examples provided and
replicating them in a national/local context
without much reliance on external resources.
CHAPTER 4_GLOBAL EXPERIENCES AND LESSONS TO LEARN
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