Hospital Waste Management among the Staff of Dental Hospitals

Master's Thesis from the year 2010 in the subject Health - Public Health, , course: MASTER OF DENTAL SURGERY, language: English, abstract: Background and objectives: Growing urbanization has led to several changes in the healthcare sector. While on one hand, access to healthcare services are being provided to the community thereby resulting in the better health for all, improper management of biomedical waste emanating from these healthcare establishments has also given rise to many environmental and health problems. Although awareness in this issue has considerably increased over the last few years, sensitivity to this problem has been limited. Most hospitals are not actively involved in addressing this problem. Also, the staffs are not trained in the proper waste management procedures. The present interventional study was conducted to assess the knowledge, attitude and practice about hospital waste management, to provide training programme on hospital waste management and to assess the effect of training among the staff of dental teaching hospitals in Bangalore city. Methodology: A specially prepared and pre-tested structured questionnaire was given to assess the knowledge, attitude and practices among the staff of dental teaching hospitals and collected personally. One day training programme on the hospital waste management was organized at each dental college. Intervention was evaluated by assessing improvements in their knowledge, change in attitude and practice scores after intervention in comparison to the base line scores. Results: Two months after intervention there was a 24.4% improvement in knowledge among the dentists, 18.7% improvement among auxiliaries and 23.3% improvement (p<0.001, significant) among the attenders when compared to the baseline knowledge. There was 36.2% change in attitude among the dentists, 33.3% change among auxiliaries, 56.42% and among the attenders (p<0.001, significant) when compared to the baseline attitude. There was a 17.6% change in practice among the dentists, 16.4 % change among auxiliaries, and 4.4 % among the attenders when compared to the baseline practice. Conclusion: The findings of this study suggest that a training programme increases the knowledge as well as the sense of responsibility resulting in change in attitude and practices. However, to implement an effective and sustainable hospital waste management system: budget support, allocation of resources and technical guidance is required. Large volumes of workload bureaucratic culture and slow percolation of decisions delays the changes that are mandated.