Awareness and practices regarding biomedical waste management among housekeeping staff of a tertiary care hospital in Western India

Background: The World Health Organization biomedical waste guidelines of 2004 emphasizes the importance of the “human factor” over technology and equipment. Housekeeping staff members are directly involved in the collection, transport, and disposal of biomedical waste and are at high risk of acquiring infections. At the same time, they are usually unskilled, uneducated, and have little to no knowledge about the segregation and disposal of biomedical waste, which further compounds their health risk. Objective: To assess the awareness and practices regarding biomedical waste management in housekeeping staff of a tertiary care hospital. Subjects and Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted among 100 housekeeping staff members of a tertiary teaching hospital in Pune, Maharashtra, from February to April 2022. A semi-structured, pretested questionnaire was used for data collection. Knowledge of the study participants was scored on a scale of 0–10 and the median score of all the study participants was taken as a cutoff for determining good and poor knowledge. The data were entered into MS Excel 2010 and analyzed using IBM SPSS software 16-trial version. The Chi-square test was used as a test of significance. Results: In the present study, 73% of study participants had good knowledge regarding biomedical waste management. All the participants (100%) were following appropriate practices regarding biomedical waste management. Age and experience were found to be significantly associated with knowledge regarding biomedical waste management (P < 0.05). Conclusion: There is a gap in the knowledge regarding biomedical waste management among the study subjects which needs to be addressed through repeated and diligent training exercises.