Articles by Kevin Webber

Working within the healthcare industry generally means dealing with prescription medications, and doing so, like all things healthcare, means complying with regulations that govern these drugs. Among the most important of these is the Controlled Substances Act (CSA), which gives the federal government the authority to single out certain drugs or substances to be much more tightly regulated than others. Drugs that are designated by the CSA as controlled substances must be treated differently than other medications, with restrictions placed on how they can be manufactured, prescribed, used, handled, stored, distributed and disposed of once they become pharmaceutical waste. Here, we’ll get into the details you need to know about controlled substances.

Regulatory compliance is essential to running a successful dental facility, and proper waste management is certainly important to that effort. Dental facilities generate a significant amount of waste that is subject to local, state and federal regulations during day-to-day operations – waste that requires special handing to ensure compliance with those regulations. To help you gain a good working knowledge of what these wastes are and how they must be handled, here are the basics on dental facilities and the waste they produce.

There are a lot of pharmaceuticals on the market today, which can certainly make it difficult to be sure your facility is managing pharmaceutical waste properly. Perhaps the most important thing to be clear on when it comes to pharma waste is the difference between how controlled pharmaceutical drugs and non-controlled ones must be handled as they become waste products. Here we’ll outline the basics on this topic, as well as the potential consequences – including the legal, environmental and public safety implications – of handling them improperly.

All medical waste generators are required by federal and state law to follow specific guidelines to properly segregate, transport, and dispose of pathology, or laboratory medical waste. Pathology waste is often generated by facilities like veterinary offices, surgical centers, hospitals, and cosmetic surgery centers where tissue or blood specimens are obtained for diagnostics and/or treatment.

Because of the extremely serious personal, legal, and financial risks associated with them, reducing the incidences of needlesticks, cuts, and punctures from loose sharps is a top priority in medical waste disposal.

Out of sight, out of mind? Not when it comes to hazardous waste disposal. Did you know that hazardous waste generators are permanently responsible for the waste they dispose of, even decades after the fact?

Nursing homes provide a very different type of care than acute-care hospitals. However, one thing that both types of facilities have in common is that both generate medical waste. While the typical nursing home may generate less regulated waste than hospitals do, nursing home medical waste is covered by the same state and federal regulations on handling that waste. So what do you need to know to help ensure your facility stays on the right side of those regulations? Here, we’ll go over some of the more important points of compliant nursing home waste management.

If your workplace is a hazardous waste generator, you should know that you are responsible for that waste even after it leaves your facility. That’s why each package of waste in every load picked up by your waste services provider must be clearly marked with your facility’s name and contact information. This makes it easy to identify who is to be held accountable for any harm that waste might cause to the public or the environment.

Dealing with pharmaceutical waste properly is very important, since getting it wrong can cause harm to people, animals and the environment, and can also have legal consequences for your facility. However, proper management of pharma waste can also be a very complicated and confusing process, given the number and complexity of state and federal regulations that apply to it. So what do you need to know to help ensure that you’re dealing with waste in a safe and compliant manner?

If your workplace generates regulated medical, pharmaceutical or hazardous waste, having a good handle on the regulatory requirements in regards to handling, transporting and storing that waste is essential. While there are many state and federal agencies that have a hand in regulating this process, the basic framework upon which most of that regulation is based come from the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA). That means that understanding your responsibilities under the law starts with learning the requirements laid out by RCRA.