PESHAWAR: The issue of hospital waste disposal in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa could not be resolved despite the installation of modern incinerators in major hospitals, including the Lady Reading Hospital (LRH), medical waste is being incinerated in the traditional way.
The LRH, the largest hospital in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, generates up to 700kg of waste per day. In the LRH, a state-of-the-art incinerator has been installed but it requires permanent management to keep it in operation.
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Meanwhile, the provincial government has stalled arrangements for the hospital waste disposal plan and even major hospitals of the province are deprived of proper medical waste incinerators. The KP government has prospered several plans but none of them has been implemented as a result even major hospitals do not have 100% arrangements for medical waste incineration facility.
The sources said that on the directions of Supreme Court of Pakistan, the KP government has devised a plan of Rs3.36 billion but it is also not a permanent solution to the problem. Therefore, disposal of medical waste is a problem in 113 hospitals in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa has become a major problem.
“The problem will be temporarily controlled with more than Rs3 billion plan,” sources old Mashriq Vibe, adding that more than 95 hospitals in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa have incinerators and 90 per cent of them have hospital waste incinerators with 100 percent functional machinery but it require permanent permanent management to keep them in operation.
The government had devised plan to handover the medical waste management to private sector and have wasted lot of time in this process. “There was a need to keep all the incinerators active in the hospitals by making permanent arrangements for it,” the hospital sources told Mashriq on the condition of anonymity. “However, there are no serious plans although there was only the need to run the already existing machine.”