Abstract
Segregation is an important step in health care waste management. If done incorrectly, the risk of preventable infections, toxic effects, and injuries to care and non-care staff, waste handlers, patients, visitors, and the community at large, is increased. It also increases the risk of environmental pollution and prevents recyclable waste from being recovered. Despite its importance, it is acknowledged that poor waste segregation occurs in most health care organizations. This study therefore intends to produce, for the first time, a classification of failure modes related to segregation in the Nuclear Medicine Department of a health care organization. This will be done using Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA), by combining an intuitionistic fuzzy hybrid weighted Euclidean distance operator, and the multicriteria method Potentially All Pairwise RanKings of all possible Alternatives (PAPRIKA). Subjective and objective weights of risk factors were considered simultaneously. The failure modes identified in the top three positions are: improper storage of waste (placing items in the wrong bins), improper labeling of containers, and bad waste management (inappropriate collection periods and bin set-up).
Highlights
Health care waste (HCW) has increased considerably over recent decades due to the increase in population, number and size of health care organizations, and through the use of disposable medical products [1]
The number of contributions using intuitionistic fuzzy sets in the field of Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA) is smaller despite the improvements they represent compared to fuzzy FMEA
Used the Interval 2-Tuple Hybrid Weighted Distance (ITHWD) operator and assignments provided by the FMEA team members are included using interval 2-tuple linguistic variables; subjective and objective weights of risk factors have been taken into account in the prioritization of the failure modes that appear in the blood transfusion process
Summary
Health care waste (HCW) has increased considerably over recent decades due to the increase in population, number and size of health care organizations, and through the use of disposable medical products [1]. Only 15% of HCW is considered hazardous material that may be infectious, toxic or radioactive [5], improper segregation of health care waste leads to mixing this waste with non-hazardous waste and so to a much higher quantity of potentially hazardous waste [6]. This increases risk of injury and toxic effects, and means more time, more staff, more steps and higher transport costs in order for it to be properly disposed of [7]. If hazardous waste were immediately separated from other waste, the amount of dangerous waste could be reduced by 2–5%, and the risk of infection to the workers handling the waste would be reduced [8]
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