[Waste from hospitals, health resorts and sanatoria]

Abstract

As part of the waste disposal planning in the administrative districts in Nordrhein-Westfalen, the present expertise intends to determines the requirements to be satisfied by the collection and intermediate storage of hospital waste, and to answer the question from a hygienic point of view as to what sort of waste may be taken to an internal garbage dump and what waste is to be burned. From among the variety of hospital refuse, that material was selected for which, as a result of the direct contact between waste and patient, a certain hygienic risk could not be entirely ruled out. This includes waste from the wards similar to private houshold garbage, medical soft waste (swabs, dressings etc.) medical solid waste (syringes, cannulae etc.). For waste other than this, disposal by way of garbage dumps is considered unproblematic or else such waste is to be disposed off in compliance with legal provisions (infection wards). For organ refuse, the only mode of disposal is by burying or burning. On perusal of the literature it was found that with regard to the hygienic condition of the above-mentioned waste, views differ widely ranging from "unobjectionable" to "infectious". Apart from this, these views are not supported by microbiological data ascertained experimentally. However, a reliable assessment cannot do without such data. Preliminary investigations were carried out to see what waste disposal routes exist in the various hospitals; then in two hospitals the waste volume of each ward was determined on 7 workdays over a total period of approx. two months and the waste was checked for the three sorts of refuse mentioned above. It was found that the refuse averaged 0.54 or 0.56 kgs per bed per day and 5.44 or 5.43 litres per bed per day with a specific weight of 0.10 kg/l. The microbiological analyses included both hospital refuse and "normal" household garbage from three dumps. Within the first group of waste the analyses covered not only waste conglomerates but also individual refuse ingredients (e.g. syringes). The workup comprised 264 waste samples from the hospital area and 21 samples from dumps, which were subjected to quantitative and qualitative microbiological tests. The results showed that hospital refuse very often contains less pathogens than household garbage and that it was even germ-free in some cases; especially individual samples repeatedly proved to be free of bacterial growth.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)