Bio-Medical Waste Management in Public & Private Hospitals: A Case Study of Peshawar

Abstract

Peshawar city’s health care system has gone through major changes in recent years to improve the services it provides to the community. This research is designed to evaluate the standards of health care services and hospital waste management from different hospital stakeholder’s viewpoint and to compare the gap between public and private hospitals in Peshawar. Stakeholder satisfaction and awareness of medical waste management is one unavoidable indicator of the HCWM; nevertheless, enhancing stakeholder satisfaction and awareness in developing countries is very challenging due to the shortage of resources as well as low awareness level regarding hospital waste. A combination of all these three objectives i.e., Service quality improvement, factors affecting hospital waste management and stakeholder perception and awareness regarding waste management can help in ensuring the practice of sustainable waste management. Further research on the sustainable waste management and leadership dimensions of health care quality will contribute to improved planning for health care services. This highlights importance of service quality dimensions for the promotion of sustainable waste management in public and private hospitals. Therefore, targeted interventions that directs to improve the dimensions of patient satisfaction where the proportion of satisfaction is low are needed. Similar studies should be conducted regularly at different levels of health facilities across the province to capture a wider picture of patient satisfaction, awareness, improvement of affecting barriers in the current practices at various levels. A mixed-method approach is adopted for the research, using a combination of expert interviews, questionnaire-interview schedule surveys, and literature review. The data will undergo descriptive data analysis, factor analysis, and content analysis. The study will try to find out the ways and methods in which we can improve hospital biomedical waste management, implement them in both public and private hospitals, by doing so we can improve the quality of life of the people and regulate any informal waste management that otherwise goes unaccountable. The findings of the research are expected to provide insight into the waste management problems associated with current practices in hospitals and act as a helping tool in the decision-making and policy formulation regarding sustainable waste management for Peshawar city.