Knowledge, attitude and practices of health care workers towards biomedical waste management: needs improvement

Apple Health care associated infections (HCAIs) are increasing among patients and drawing governments and regulatory bodies. Proper bio medical waste (BMW) management reduces cross infection in hospitals, but compliance to follow these rules and recommended instructions is commonly poor. A pilot study was conducted over a period of 3 months in a tertiary teaching care hospital in India included 100 randomly selected study subjects from 5 different wards like intensive care units (ICU’s), labour rooms, paediatrics, casualty and burns department , out of them 20 were doctors, nurses (20), undergraduate medical students (20), nursing attendants (20) and sweepers (20). The highest level of knowledge regarding BMW legislation was among the doctors (70%) and least among the sweepers (35%). By analysing the knowledge of BMW practices doctors had the maximum (100%) and sweepers had minimum (25%) knowledge. On analysing attitude towards BMW, all the categories of HCWs had a favourable attitude. Mean attitude score was 8.34, out of which the best was among doctors (8.75) and least favourable was among sweepers (7.8). The study subjects were observed for their waste management practices and precautions taken by them for safe management. Only 50% of the study subjects discard waste according to the colour coding. So, compliance of bio-medical waste management practices should be corrected finely to reduce HCAI among HCWs.