Healthcare Waste Composition and Generation Rate in Menellik II Referral Hospital, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia: A Cross Sectional Study

Abstract

Healthcare facilities generate tremendous amount of infectious waste from healthcare activities. Despite the great potential for environmental hazards and public health risks of healthcare waste, its proper handling and management is significantly undermined in many developing countries where the actual amount of healthcare waste generated and its composition in Ethiopia is not well defined. Thus it is important to determine the existing generation rate in the hospital. Across-sectional study design was employed to assess the waste composition and determine generation rate in Menellik II hospital. A calibrated sensitive weight scale was used to quantify the generation rate of health care waste for seven days. Data was entered, arranged and analyzed using MS office excel sversion 2007and SPS Sversion 20. Correlation and regression analysis were computed to know the relationships between magnitude of waste generated and other variables. The results showed that the mean waste generation rate was found to be 1.94Kg/bed/day±0.335, comprised of 40.9% (130.20Kg/day±38.22) general and 59.1% (187.89Kg/day±38.85) hazardous wastes. The amount of waste generated was positively correlated with patients treated per day (r=0.835, p<0.05). The waste generation rate and proportion was also significantly varies between inpatients and outpatients (t=4.353, P<0.01) and there was a statistical significance difference among case teams (X2=56.558, p<0.0001). The mean generation rate in the hospital was comparable to other studies in Ethiopia but higher than Sub Saharan African countries. The proportion of hazardous waste (59.1%) was above the threshold set by the WHO (10-25%). This is because of malpractices of healthcare waste segregation. Therefore providing safe waste management technologies, adherence to national policy and awareness rising of all concerned needs to adopt in the hospital.