How to Reduce Medical Waste at your Hospital?

by John Steffen Consultant Medical waste handling process may vary from one institution to another, but one should know the basics of differentiating between categories of medical waste to segregate and dispose them of properly. It will help reduce medical waste at your institution and thus lead to better medical waste management.

1) Sanitizing is the key.
Usually medical linens like towels, pillowcases, sheets, dresses etc. are not disposed of after one use. Sanitize these items rather than instinctively dumping them into medical waste bins. The best possible way to slash down the medical waste output is by sanitizing them while laundry and reusing the items.

2) Limit access to medical waste bins.
Always ensure to educate your patients about the waste bins so that they don’t carelessly dump pizza boxes and soda cans into the regulated medical waste containers. Not just patients but even visitors should be taught to avoid throwing any unwanted waste into medical bins. Since medical waste containers are solely made for medical waste, thus any unrelated item in the bins will create excessive waste.

3) Staff training is imperative.
First and foremost, the policies and waste management practices of your institution should be quite rigid so that your staff knows well to dispose of the waste. Train your staff in such a manner that the waste is segregated properly at the first step of dumping only and is not required to be segregated later.
You can even try contacting you medical waste bin suppliers to conduct a training program for staff members. You can expect a great reduction in medical waste once your staff knows the basics of waste disposal.

4) Training never stops.
As humans, we cannot become perfect in one class of training. The training of your staff members should never stop and new methodologies and technologies should be incorporated regularly. Regular training helps to keep the personnel away from falling back into old habits.

5) Strive for actual generation of medical waste.
Usually, hospitals depend on the bills generated by medical waste disposal companies and have no idea about the actual generation of medical waste. Although, it is not necessary to have an exact idea but there’s no harm in having estimates, it will help the authorities to pour in suggestions for a better medical waste management.


You can minimize an institution’s medical waste only if you have better facts-on-the-ground information about it.


With this article we have discussed few steps you can take to reduce medical waste. To know more about topics such as Medical Waste Bins Suppliers, Kitchen Waste Bins etc. keep reading our upcoming articles.

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Created on Sep 6th 2017 05:29. Viewed 1,015 times.

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