Abstract
The population of Saudi Arabia is about 32 million with continuously increasing waste generated from healthcare facilities. Assessment of medical waste (MW) generation rates in hospitals is a crucial step in medical waste management and disposal systems. The objective of this study was to analyze the present status of medical waste management and to statistically evaluate the generation rates of MW in healthcare centers and hospitals located in the Eastern Province of Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). The average per hospital MW production in the Eastern Province (EP) was found to be 640.74 (± 0.59) ton/year. The study results showed that the average production per health center was 0.598 (± 0.119) ton/year. In addition, the calculated average MW generation rate is 0.51 kg/bed/day and the average MW produced per patient per day is1.66 kg/patient/day. The estimation of MW production in the EP about 5781.9 ton/day. Moreover, this study reveals that the practice used in all healthcare centers and hospitals in the Eastern Province is to separate solid waste from MW and to collect and transfer for final dumping in a non-engineered landfill by operated by private authorized companies. This study strongly recommends using autoclave technology for the plastic part of the medical waste at the collection site and reuse as fuel in waste-to-energy facilities or as a fuel alternative in cement industry.
Similar content being viewed by others
Abbreviations
- MW:
-
Medical waste
- MWM:
-
Medical waste management
- WHO:
-
World Health Organization
- EPA:
-
Environmental Protection Agency
- KSA:
-
Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
- EP:
-
Eastern Province
- SEPCO:
-
Saudi Gulf Company Environmental Protection
- KAMC:
-
King Abdulaziz Medical City
- NHMRC:
-
National Health and Medical Research Council
- GAMEP:
-
General Authority for Meteorology and Environmental Protection
- CCASG:
-
Cooperation Council for the Arab States of the Gulf
- USOTA:
-
US Office of Technology Assessment
- HBV:
-
Hepatitis B virus
- HSYB:
-
Health Statistical Yearbook
- CDSI:
-
Central Department of Statistics and Information
- SPSS:
-
Statistical Package for Social Analysis
- SD:
-
Standard deviation
References
Abdulla F, Qdais HA, Rabi A (2008) Site investigation on medical waste management practices in Northern Jordan. Waste Manag 28:450–458
Alagöz BA, Kocasoy G and Kilic M (2006) The evaluation of the medical waste control regulation of Turkey in comparison with the EU Environmental Directives. In: Proceedings of the ISWA Annual Congress 2006. Copenhagen, Denmark
Al-Emad AA (2011) Assessment of the medical waste management in the main hospitals in Yemen. East Mediter Health J 17(10):730–737
Al-Ghamdi AY (2011) Review on hospital wastes and its possible treatments Egyptian Academic. J Biol Sci 3(1):55–62
Alghazo J, Omar Oudam KM, El Hassan A (2018) E-waste environmental and information security threat: GCC countries vulnerabilities. Eur Mediterr J Environ Integr 3(1):13
Aljabre SHM (2002) Hospital generated waste: a plan for its proper management. J Fam Community Med 9(2):61–65
Aljabre SHM, Hoffmann F, Almorzog BS, Mikiling L, Alabdullatif M, Al-Quorain AA (2002) kplHospital generated waste: An assessment of the awareness of hospital staff. J Fam Community Med 9(1):47–50
Almalki M, Fitzgerald G, Clark M (2011) Health care system in Saudi Arabia: an overview. East Mediter Health J 17(10):784–793
Almuneef M, Memish ZA (2003) Effective medical waste management: it can be done. Am J Infect Control 31(3):188–192
Al-Owain R, Aldorwish Y (2001) Medical radioactive waste management in Saudi Arabia Waste Management Conference (WM’01), February 25–March, 2001. Tucson, AZ
Al-Shallash KS and Shereif MM (2007) Healthcare waste management in Saudi Arabia: a case study. In: Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Environmental Science and Technology, Kos Island, Greece, 5–7 September, 2007, pp. B24 – B27
Awodele O, Adewoye AA, Oparah AC (2016) Assessment of medical waste management in seven hospitals in Lagos Niger. BMC Public Health 16:269
Bdour A, Altrabsheh B, Hadadin N, Al-Shareif M (2007) Assessment of medical waste management practice: a case study of the northern part of Jordan. Waste Manag 27:746–759
Belgiorno V (2017) Sustainability of medical waste management in different sized health care facilities Alessandra Cesaro. Waste Biomass Valor 8:1819–1827
Birpinar ME, Bilgili MS, Erdogan T (2009) Medical waste management in Turkey: a case study of Istanbul. Waste Manag 29:445–448
Central Department of Statistics and Information (CDSI) (2012) Key indicators, Saudi Arabia. http://www.cdsi.gov.sa/english/. Accessed 25 Sept 2012
Cesaro A, Belgiorno V (2016) Sustainability of medical waste management in different sized health care facilities. Waste Biomass Valoriz 1–9
Deghehani MH et al (2008) Assessment of medical waste management in educational hospitals of Tehran university medical sciences. Iran J Environ Health Sci Eng 5(2):131–136
Department for Environmental, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) (2005) Guidelines on mixing hazardous waste—hazardous waste regulations, London, UK
Giacchetta G, Marchetti B (2013) Medical waste management: a case study in a small size hospital of central Italy. Strateg Outsourcing: Int J 6(1):65–84
Hagen DL, Al-Humaidi F, Blake MA (2001) Infectious waste surveys in a Saudi Arabian hospital: an important quality improvement tool. Am J Infect Control 29(3):198–202
HSYB Health Statistical Year Book (2003) Ministry of Health, Saudi Arabia (http://www.moh.gov.sa/en/Ministry/Statistics/book/Pages/default.aspx). Accessed 30 Sept 2012
Jang Y-C, Lee C, Yoon Oh-S, Kim H (2006) Medical waste management in Korea. J Env Manag 80:107–115
Kamble S, Singh A, Kharat M (2017) A hybrid life cycle assessment based fuzzy multi-criteria decision making approach for evaluation and selection of an appropriate municipal wastewater treatment technology. Euro-Mediterr J Environ Integr. https://doi.org/10.1007/s41207-017-0019-8
Karademir A (2004) Health risk assessment of PCDD/F emission from a hazardous and medical waste incinerator in Turkey. Env Int J 30:1027–1038
Komilis DP (2016) Issues on medical waste management research. Waste Manag 48:1–2
Landrum VJ, Barton RG, Neulicht R, Turner M, Wallace D, Smith S (1991) Medical waste management and disposal US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Noyes Data Corporation, Park Ridge
Makajic-Nikolic D, Petrovic N, Belic A, Rokvic M, Radakovic JA, Tubic V (2016) The fault tree analysis of infectious medical waste management. J Clean Prod 113:365–373
National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) (1999) National guidelines in for waste management in the health Industry. NHMRC, Canberra
Ouda OKM, Cekirge HM, Raza SA (2013) An assessment of the potential contribution from waste-t-energy facilities to electricity demand in Saudi Arabia. Energy Convers Manag 75:402–406
Oweis R, Al-Widyan M, Al-Limoon O (2005) Medical waste management in Jordan: a study at the King Hussein Medical Centre. Waste Manag 25:622–625
Rushbrook PH, Chandra C, Gayton S, (2000) Starting healthcare waste management in medical institution, practical approach World Health Organization (WHO) Healthcare Practical Information, Series No. 1
Shareefdeen ZM (2012) ‘Medical waste management and control’, J Environ Prot vol. 3(12):1625–1628 http://file.scirp.org/Html/3-6701673_25649.htm. Accessed 23 Oct 2013
Sharma S (2010) Awareness about bio-medical waste management among health care personnel of some important medical centres in Agra. Int J Env Sci Dev 1(3):251–255
Silva CE, Hoppe AE, Ravanello MM, Mello N (2005) Medical waste management in the south of Brazil. Waste Manag 25:600–605
US Congress Office of Technology Assessment (USOTA) (1988) Issues in Medical Waste Management—Background Paper, OTA-BP-O-49 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, Oct 1988)
Windfeld E, Brooks M (2015) Medical waste management—a review. J Environ Manag 163:98–108
World Health Organization (WHO) (1999) In: Pruss A, Giroult E, Rushbrook P (ed) Safe management of wastes from health care activities, 1999
Acknowledgement
This work was funded By Deanship of Scientific Research at Imam Abdulrahman Bin Faisal University (project no. 2,013,188). Special thanks go to Bader Aldosary, Mohammad Alsaif and Ahmad Almousa for the help in collecting the data.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflict of interest
On behalf of all authors, the corresponding author states that there is no conflict of interest.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Alagha, O., Alomari, A. & Jarrah, N. Medical waste management and production rate in the Eastern Province of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Euro-Mediterr J Environ Integr 3, 35 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41207-018-0078-5
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s41207-018-0078-5