Hospital Waste Management and Challenges on Environmental Health in Ado-Ekiti, Nigeria

Abstract

Hospital waste management is gaining more attention through regulation and legislation in many countries but with various degrees of implementation underpinned by resource allocation and awareness. This paper examined the compliance level of waste management with recommended best practices in line with sustainable healthcare waste management. It adopted a descriptive research design. Participants included 86 respondents, including 66 staff of the selected hospitals and 20 non-staff. Data collected using a self-constructed questionnaire was analysed using descriptive analysis of frequency count and simple percentage. It was revealed that the waste unit is vital in the hospital management structure. It underscores that mismanagement of healthcare wastes leads to contamination of water, soil and air resources and thus results in health risks to the environment and people living there. The findings revealed that hospital administration effectively controls waste disposal while considering the dangerous results of poor sanitation practices. The study's conclusions were discussed in the light of available literature on best practices, and recommendations were made. As noted in the region, the existing deficiencies and inconsistencies in the waste management conduct led to the request for measures to bridge the gap within the nation’s economic and technological capacity limits. In this view, a proper waste management scheme that requires internal segregation based on waste characterization to redirect the wastes from the mainstream is being advocated with the expectation that healthcare waste management will improve significantly in the region and across the country in general.