The Hindu : Tamil Nadu News : Private hospitals doing better in biowaste management

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Jun 11, 2004

Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu

Private hospitals doing better in biowaste management

By Ramya Kannan and
Karthik Subramanian

CHENNAI, JUNE 10. While government hospitals in Chennai still seem fuzzy about handling biomedical waste, a section of private hospitals in the city seems to have got its act together, following the provisions of the Biomedical Waste (Handling and Management) Rules, 1998.

In the forefront of solving the problem is the establishment of two private common treatment facilities, conforming to Tamil Nadu Pollution Control Board standards. The two units, about 40 km from Chennai, have come up within the last two years and offer services at Rs. 3 per bed a day.

GJ Multiclave has a 15-acre waste treatment facility off Singaperumal Koil and has been meeting the demands of 7,000 beds. The facility was commissioned last year and its promoters say it has the capacity to treat 20,000 beds. While body parts are incinerated, syringes and other hospital wastes are autoclaved before being destroyed.

Tamil Nadu Waste Management has a similar facility near Padappai with a capacity to treat 15,000 beds. It was commissioned four months ago.

Environmentalists point out that government hospitals do not utilise the services of the centralised units, which will solve the problem of disposal. They also question the status of an autoclaving unit commissioned by the state, supposed to come up at Chengalpattu.

The improvement in the performance of private hospitals is reflected in a survey conducted by Shristi, a Delhi-based organisation, and Consumer and Civic Action Group (CAG) along with Toxics Link in 2002. Fiftytwo hospitals were examined in the survey, including private hospitals, the four major government medical hospitals in the city, the veterinary college and two blood banks.

This followed a study done in 2000 of 17 hospitals, which were rated on a scale of plus five-minus five in medical waste disposal. Though most of the hospitals fared badly, the four government hospitals were at the bottom of the pile with a rating of minus five.

While the aggregate improvement in the private sector, in segregation of wastes went up from 62 to 82 per cent, pre-treatment procedures had improved by 32 percentage points since 2000. Solid waste management was marginally better, but very little attention was being paid to handling of liquid waste, environmentalists say. Clearly, the centralised units made a huge difference to the larger private hospitals' problems in disposal.

In the government hospitals, however, segregation showed a marginal improvement and awareness increased, but other sectors of biomedical waste handling showed no improvement.

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