An intervention significantly improve medical waste handling and management: A consequence of raising knowledge and practical skills of health care workers
Abstract
Objective: Health-care waste has not attended much attention in developing countries. Staff is involved in cleaning and collect waste may often be at greater risk due to their less education and training. The current intervention study was conducted to improve knowledge and practice skills for medical waste handlers in some selected hospitals of Alexandria, Egypt.
Methods: An intervention study was conducted on medical waste handlers from some selected hospitals who accepted to participate in the study in the period of May 2015 to June 2016. A predesigned questionnaire was developed to measure knowledge, skills, and practice on medical waste management pre- and post-intervention.
Results: Analysis of pre-intervention data revealed that 9.6%, 80.8%, and 9.6% of participants had high, moderate, and low knowledge levels, respectively. Whereas post-intervention, data revealed that 97.3%, 2.2%, and 0.5% of workers had high, moderate, and low knowledge levels, respectively. A significant increase in knowledge after the intervention was detected among all knowledge items except in four items which were related to the necessity to segregate medical waste, knowledge of color coding system for segregation, disposal of general waste in black bags and disposal of infectious waste in red bags. Regarding practice of waste handlers, 80% were in poor practice category pre-training and changed to 0.8% post-training; 1.1% were in good practice category and increased to 92.1% post-training.
Conclusion: The current findings emphasize the role of educative skill-raising training in enhancing knowledge and practice skills of medical waste handlers.
Keywords:
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).