Assessing knowledge, performance, and efficiency for hospital waste management—a comparison of government and private hospitals in Pakistan

Proper management of healthcare waste is a critical concern in many developing countries of the world. Rapid urbanization and population growth rates pose serious challenges to the existing healthcare waste management infrastructure in such countries. This study was aimed at monitoring the situation of hospital waste management in a major city of Pakistan. Simple random sampling was used to select 12 government and private hospitals. Field visits, physical measurements and questionnaire survey method were used for data collection. Information was obtained regarding hospital waste generation, segregation, collection, storage, transportation and disposal. Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) was used to classify the hospitals on the basis of their relative waste management efficiencies. The weighted average total waste generation at the surveyed hospitals was discovered to be 1.53 Kg/patient day-1 of which 75.15% consisted of general waste and the remaining consisted of biomedical waste. Of the total waste, 24.54% came from the public hospital and the remaining came from the private hospitals. DEA showed that seven of the surveyed hospitals had scale or pure technical inefficiencies in their waste management activities. The public hospital was relatively less efficient than the private hospitals in these activities. Results of the questionnaire survey showed that none of the surveyed hospitals was completely following government rules regarding safe management of healthcare wastes. The current situation should be rectified in order to avoid environmental and public health risks