Occupational health and safety-oriented medical waste management: A case study of Istanbul

Abstract

The outstanding pace of technological development around the world coupled with increasing population and rapid urbanization have brought along an ever-increasing demand for healthcare services. This trend results in an increasing amount and variety of medical wastes. Accordingly, the issue of effective collection, transportation and disposal of medical wastes, specifically in large cities, has become a critical concern from the viewpoint of urban logistics and holds great importance in terms of safety. This study aims to determine the safety of hospitals in their medical waste management function. The study involves the determination of medical waste management steps, establishment of a hierarchical structure, and weighting of the criteria within the established hierarchical structure by means of the analytic hierarchy process method. Afterwards, the extent to which these criteria are adopted in hospitals was evaluated by the medical waste management officers of those hospitals, and safety scores were obtained for each hospital by associating the results with the weighted values obtained by the analytic hierarchy process method. The model proposed for medical waste management problems encountered by healthcare institutions in Istanbul was implemented for a specific region of Istanbul province, and the obtained results were analyzed. Evaluation of the opinions of the healthcare officials for determination of the medical waste management safety scores showed that the “collection” criterion has significantly higher importance than the “temporary storage” and “transportation” criteria. “The effect on hospital personnel” sub-criterion of the “collection” criterion had the highest score. This revealed the importance of the collection process that takes place between storage and transportation, for evaluating the human waste-based risks.

Emergency response to the explosive growth of health care wastes during COVID-19 pandemic in Wuhan, China

“…Therefore, all of these HCWs were collected with strict segregation packages and managed according to the criterions of infectious wastes ( MEE, 2008 ) during the COVID-19 epidemic in Wuhan. An investigation was conducted to evaluate the risks of the HCWs management, showing that the collection had higher importance than the temporary storage and the transportation ( Eren and Tuzkaya, 2019 ). The specialized turnover containers ( MEE, 2008 ) for HCWs collection have been massively supplied by the local government, from 4000 to 19,000 ( Table 1 ).…”

Evaluation of Waste Management Practices of Health Care Units: A Graph Theoretic and Matrix

“…Eren and Tuzkaya, [5] evaluated the risk of occupational health hazards associated with different stages of waste management practices in the HCUs of Turkey. They identified three major steps of waste management process as 'collection', 'temporary storage' and 'transportation' and employed AHP to evaluate the potential transmission of infectious diseases to health care workers based on the responses collected from the health care staffs.…”

“…It leads conversion of non-infectious waste to Infectious and thus hampers the utilization of treatment and recycling opportunity of HCW [4].The wastes generated by the healthcare sector leave permanent effects in the air, water and earth thus posing serious environmental risks with the additional hazards of injection agents and viruses [5]. HCW contains large amounts of (Organic Solid Waste) OSW, which are estimated as the main sources of leachates.…”

Cuckoo optimization algorithm in reverse logistics: A network design for COVID-19 waste management

“…The issue of waste disposal in hospitals is a very important problem and much research has been done in this area, including Gai et al (2009), Taghipour and Mosaferi (2009), Karpušenkaitė et al (2016), Jabbari et al (2012), andEren andTuzkaya (2019).…”