Who touched your Medical Waste today?
July 7th, 2010
In a hospital, you have a little red bag container in a soiled linen closet patiently awaiting for its contents to be dropped off by a nurse, doctor, or environmental services representative. In a busy hospital, and depending on where that closet is located within the hospital, determines how frequently or infrequently the red bag container is gathered and transferred to another container to be moved around the hospital, eventually reaching a pick-up point to exit the hospital for treatment.
So, potentially hazardous waste is essentially housed inside a "sealed" container, is collected and handled multiple times throughout the gathering, collecting, and transporting phase in the medical waste treatment process, and has the potential to be aged by several days or even weeks at a time. Further, assuming this waste is being transported off site to a medical waste treatment facility to be gathered, collected, and transferred one more time, this hazardous waste not only has the potential to be exposed to our environment while on the open roads, but it has the potential to not go through the treatment process at all. Yet, the hospital still has complete responsibility for this waste, as we often see the term cradle-to-grave responsibility being tossed around, no pun intended, and the hospital has responsibility to that waste until it reaches the landfill. This leaves me asking one very important question…
If you, as the hospital, have to assume all of this risk anyway, why not implement a system that requires less gathering, collecting, and transporting, does not require your waste to leave the hospital grounds to be treated, reduces your liability, all the while enhancing your hospitals' green practice and significantly reducing costs?
Literally, this could be a Million Dollar Question over 7-10 years…
Kind Regards,
MedClean Marketing Team
AI
