Tuesday, September 16, 2008 City Hall owns lapses on CCMC waste, says cell for body parts already full
THE reported dumping of hospital waste, which included body parts, at the Inayawan landfill last Friday afternoon has invited the attention of the Department of Health (DOH) 7.
“We will conduct an investigation because part of hospital licensing is checking if the hospital has a proper disposal system of hospital waste,” said Dr. Angelita Salarda, chief of the regional health and regulations division.
Councilor Christopher Alix admitted there were lapses in the way body parts and other pathological wastes were disposed by the Cebu City Medical Center (CCMC).
Alix briefed reporters on the circumstances of the incident after his closed door meeting-investigation with CCMC acting chief Myrna Go and Department of Public Services (DPS) head Dionisio Gualiza.
He said that although the City is allowed to throw hospital wastes at the Inayawan landfill, DOH guidelines specify that these should be done in a separate pit and should be treated.
But because the designated pit for hospital wastes at the landfill is already full, these were thrown into the main dump site, said Alix, chairman of the City Council committee on health.
Waste management
This has prompted Mayor Tomas Osmeña to order CCMC to avail itself of the services of a private hospital waste disposal management firm as soon as possible.
Salarda said hospitals are required to have a Hospital Health Care Waste Management Program, otherwise they would not get their operation licenses.
The program mandates hospitals to segregate hospital waste into general (dry and wet), sharp, and pathological.
“For wastes that are either sharp or pathological, we require hospitals to have a decaying pit,” said Salarda.
But due to high costs of constructing and maintaining a decaying pit, most hospitals instead come up with alternatives, like the specially dug-up hole of CCMC at the Inayawan landfill.
“Some hospitals even give the body parts to the patients’ relatives, granted that there is an agreement that these will be buried,” Salarda added.
In order to avoid future dumping of body parts in landfills, Salarda said they will strictly implement the waste management program.
Lapse
Alix said that the CCMC official in charge of waste disposal failed to specify in his instructions to the garbage collectors that the tissues they were disposing of were body tissues and not tissue paper.
Gualiza said they were not supposed to bring body parts to the Inayawan landfill but did not know what CCMC was throwing away when they packed the garbage.
Alix said the City may hire the services of the Pollution Abatement Systems Specialists Inc. (Passi), which collects, transports and treats hazardous hospital wastes, including body parts and tissues and supplies like syringes, dextrose, cottons, diapers, among others.
The contract, though, will have to be bid out.
Passi president Antonio Tompar said it will not cost the CCMC much to dispose of their wastes properly.
Based on the study of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources in 2001, each hospital bed generates half a kilo of wastes.
Passi charges P37 per kilo of hospital waste, or P18.50 per bed.
In the case of CCMC, which has a 300-bed capacity and a daily admission of 200 patients, it would cost P3,700 a day to dispose of hospital wastes, or some P114,000 a month.
Services
The charges cover the collection, transport and treatment of hazardous wastes using special vehicles and autoclave machines that burn and shred the pathological wastes and used hospital supplies.
“Aside from burning the wastes, we also shred them to make sure they are recycled before burying them in a designated pit in Inayawan. Provided the wastes are treated, we are allowed to dump them there,” Tompar told Sun.Star Cebu.
As agreed on yesterday, Go said they will continue to go through the usual process of segregating their garbage and asking the DPS to dispose of these at the landfill.
“But dili na lang nato iapil ang pathological wastes and body parts until they can find a legal way of disposing of them, or until we can hire the services of a private company,” she told Sun.Star Cebu. (EPB/LCR)
