Evaluation of an education and training intervention to reduce health care waste in a tertiary hospital in Spain

Background: In recent decades there has been a significant increase in waste generation. Training interventions in advanced health care waste management can improve the segregation of regulated medical waste and reduce volume and costs. Methods: We carried out a quasi-experimental intervention study with before and after training session analysis to compare waste segregation. Descriptive analysis of the segregated health care waste and an evaluation of the quality of segregation were done. A comparison of monthly average waste to assess the effectiveness of the educational intervention was performed. Results: After the intervention, there was a significant reduction in the monthly average health care waste volume of 6.2%. Statistically significant differences in the infectious waste and genotoxic/pharmaceutical waste weight segregated before and after the intervention (P < .05) were found. Because of the health care waste weight reduction and the improvement of waste classification, a savings cost of is an element of 125,205 was achieved. Conclusions: The health care waste management training improves biomedical waste segregation at the hospital, reducing the health care waste volume and costs as an added value. Copyright (C) 2014 by the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology, Inc. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.