Abstract
This paper examines the dependence of the healthcare waste (HCW) generation rate on several social-economic and environmental parameters. Correlations were calculated between the quantities of healthcare waste generated (expressed in kg/bed/day) versus economic indices (GDP, healthcare expenditure per capita), social indices (HDI, IHDI, MPI, life expectancy, mean years of schooling, HIV prevalence, deaths due to tuberculosis and malaria, and under five mortality rate), and an environmental sustainability index (total CO2 emissions) from 42 countries worldwide. The statistical analysis included the examination of the normality of the data and the formation of linear multiple regression models to further investigate the correlation between those indices and HCW generation rates. Pearson and Spearman correlation coefficients were also calculated for all pairwise comparisons. Results showed that the life expectancy, the HDI, the mean years of schooling and the CO2 emissions positively affect the HCW generation rates and can be used as statistical predictors of those rates. The resulting best reduced regression model included the life expectancy and the CO2 emissions and explained 85% of the variability of the response.
Highlights
A variety of terms have been used in the literature to describe medical waste
There are a variety of factors that contribute to the variability of the reported HCW generation rates (HCWGR), such as different hospital services, uncertainty on whether the non-hazardous fraction is included in the quantification of HCWGR, the units of expressing HCWGR, financial factors, etc
The data are clustered by continent. It can be roughly observed from these two figures that there seems to be some type of correlation between healthcare waste” (HCW) and gross domestic product (GDP)
Summary
A variety of terms have been used in the literature to describe medical waste. In recent articles, the most popular term appears to be “healthcare waste” (HCW) and the most classical unit for the expression of its generation rate is mass per bed per day. When reporting HCW generation rates (HCWGR), it is very important to specify whether the non-hazardous waste stream is included, since that fraction usually constitutes 80% of the total HCW stream, based on rough estimations provided by WHO [1]. Still, this estimation needs to be further investigated with detailed studies. There are a variety of factors that contribute to the variability of the reported HCWGR, such as different hospital services, uncertainty on whether the non-hazardous fraction is included in the quantification of HCWGR, the units of expressing HCWGR, financial factors, etc. The comparison may be more reliable among the most economically developing countries, for which there are similar environmental problems and strict budgets [3]
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