Abstract

Hospital waste is a mixture of general refuse, biomedical laboratory and pathological wastes. Between 75-90% of the waste produced by the health care providers is non-risk health care waste whereas, the remaining 10-25% consist of infectious pathological waste and is of great health concern, if not segregated from general hospital waste. Various studies have reported the waste generation in urban centers of Pakistan, however, no data has been reported previously for Balochistan. Current study surveyed public sector hospitals in Balochistan (Quetta City) and hospital waste was segregated based on their specification and categorized into: general, bio-medical and hazardous wastes. The amount of waste produced in Surgical departments/Operation Theatres was approximately: general (1.75 kg/bed/day), medical (0.30 kg/bed day) and hazardous (0.013 kg/bed/day). Similarly, the average daily waste produced for General/Non-surgical Wards was: general (0.350 kg/bed/day), medical (0.050 kg/bed/day) and hazardous (0.002 kg/bed/day). Amount of biomedical waste from all hospitals consisted of needles (0.45 kg/bed/day), gloves (0.480 kg/bed/day), drain tubes (0.30 kg/bed/day), cottons and gauze (0.40kg/bed/day), napkins (0.02 kg/bed/day), plastic syringes (0.30 kg/bed/day), swap (0.005 kg/bed/day) and body parts (0.40 kg/bed/day). As a whole, 8-10% of total waste was hazardous, 10% was biomedical of the total waste. Although the data is comparable with other cities of Pakistan, more studies are warranted to enumerate other private medical facilities in order to find their generation and means of disposal.

Keywords:

Disposal techniques, hazardous biomedical waste, infectious diseases, pollution, waste segregation,

References

Competing interests

The authors have no competing interests.

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The authors have no competing interests.