The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Coimbatore News : Importance of segregating waste at hospitals stressed

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Tamil Nadu - Coimbatore

Importance of segregating waste at hospitals stressed

Special Correspondent

Workshop discusses effective biomedical waste management

Infectious waste to be segregated according to the colour codification
Doctors, nurses told to follow pollution control board guidelines

COIMBATORE: A workshop to discuss the progress in biomedical waste management in the city on Friday called upon hospitals, other health care centres and laboratories to ensure that the infectious waste they generated were segregated according to the colour codification. Only this would help in safe disposal of the waste, speakers from hospitals, pollution control board and non-Governmental organisations said.

Identifying problems

The C.P.R. Environmental Education Centre (CPREEC) and the Indian Medical Association (IMA) organised the workshop for doctors, paramedics and other staff members of the hospitals in the city to highlight the current trends or practices in biomedical waste management and to identify problems that hampered safe disposal.

In his opening remarks, IMA, Coimbatore Branch, president N.V. Girish said though Coimbatore was doing well in safe disposal of biomedical waste, some more hospitals were still not sending their waste to a common facility.

“We are asking them to join the present system so that Coimbatore can lead the way in effective biomedical waste management,” he said.

Guidelines

Some changes should be made to the existing guidelines, especially with regard to the destroying of used needles. Rather than burying the needles, these should be incinerated.

Senior Environmental Education Engineer of CPREEC T.S. Sundaramoorthy said the number of biomedical waste disposal units should be increased across the country. There were only 50 units across the country while the requirement was much more. With 13 units, Tamil Nadu had a higher number than other States, he said.

Segregation was vital as 80 per cent to 85 per cent of the total amount of waste was municipal solid waste. Only the rest was bio-medical waste.

Each type of biomedical waste must be stored in separate containers as per the colour codification. There must be extreme care in handling mercury waste.

Uniform diposal

Mr. Sundaramoorthy said the colour codification must be made uniform because there were variations in the system adopted by various disposal units.

Former president of the Indian Medical Association Nursing Home Board, Coimbatore Branch, S.V. Kandaswamy said nurses played an important role in safe practices in terms of segregation and storage of biomedical waste.

“Doctors are the worst culprits. They do not adhere to the guidelines stringently,” the urologist said.

He called upon nurses to insist that doctors followed the pollution control board guidelines.

President of the board R. Palanisamy asked the doctors and nurses participating in the workshop to take from it the important message of safe segregation and storage of biomedical waste and generate greater awareness on these in their hospitals.

Members of NGOs, officials of the Tamil Nadu Pollution Control Board and biomedical disposal units also addressed various issues related to current practices and requirement for safe disposal.

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