Biomedical waste management awareness in public and private hospitals in a district of North India

Abstract

Background: For proper disposal of bio-medical waste, introduction of laws only is not sufficient enough but the development of healthcare system that creates awareness and promote effective enforcement of existing BMW management guidelines among all healthcare personnel assumes primary importance. This study was planned to assess the biomedical waste management awareness among paramedical and auxiliary personnel in public and private hospitals in Meerut city.Methods: A cross sectional observational study was carried out in 384 paramedical and sanitary staff of three government and three private hospitals of Meerut from November 2015 to October 2016. Information was collected on predesigned and pretested semi structured questionnaire. Scoring was done on the basis of response to each of the question awarding 1 mark to correct response and zero mark to wrong response. Score obtained between 0-5, 6-10 and 11-15 were labelled as poor, average and good knowledge respectively.Results: In the present study 68.7% (264) of studied paramedical and auxiliary staff was untrained in both public and private hospitals. However, the higher percentage of untrained staff was observed in public hospitals as compared to private hospitals for any category of staff. In public hospitals 28.1% nurses, 25.0% technicians, 15.0% ward boys/aaya, 29.7% sweepers had gone through training for Bio medical waste disposal as compared to 37.5%, 41.7%, 30.0% and 39.1% respectively in private hospitals.Conclusions: The overall awareness was found maximum among nurses as compared to technicians, ward boys/aaya and sweepers. On comparing the percentage of correct responses and scoring in public and private hospital workers, the paramedical and auxiliary staff of private hospitals had higher percentage of correct responses for most of questions. Intensive training programme at regular time interval should be done repeatedly to train and retrain all the staff, which may include question raising and problem solving approach.