Medical Waste Articles

As a manager in a medical office or clinic, you are certainly aware of the risks to your staff posed by medical waste, as well as the OSHA regulations that address that risk. Complying with OSHA’s guidelines for medical waste management in the workplace is essential to minimizing risks to employees, protecting their health and safety. It is also essential to protecting your facility against the legal and financial consequences of compliance mistakes. To make things a bit easier, here are a few important steps to help ensure OSHA medical waste compliance in your workplace.

In this day and age, nearly everyone knows that the hypodermic needles used to give injections belong in sharps containers when it comes time to discard them. That simple fact has become common knowledge over recent years, even among people who are not in the healthcare field. However, what is murkier in the minds of many – even medical professionals, medical office managers and other support staff – is what, besides those needles, should be disposed of in these specialized containers. Here we’ll help clear the confusion by outlining what else should go in sharps containers in order to ensure compliance with medical waste management best practices.

Managing the day-to-day operations of a medical clinic is no walk in the park, as any administrator or office manager knows only too well. There’s lots of moving parts to manage every day, and it’s your job to meld all of them into one, very well-oiled machine. Many of the tasks that make things move along smoothly are delegated to others, but in the end, if there are problems, responsibility for them comes straight back to you.

If you're responsible for dealing with the collection, segregation, labeling, packaging, and disposal of medical waste, it's important that you fully understand Alabama's medical waste disposal regulations. 

Is chemotherapy a medical waste, or is it managed as hazardous waste? Which container and labeling should you use? Proper disposal is one of the biggest day-to-day challenges you face. It's often complicated by other concerns like state and local regulations, HIPAA, and potential litigation exposure. 

Medical facilities, ranging from small medical offices to large healthcare facilities, are regulated medical waste generators. That means that they are responsible for handling that waste responsibly and in compliance with federal and state regulations. Facilities are responsible for their medical waste from the time it is generated straight through until it is treated and is no longer hazardous to the public or the environment. This “cradle to grave” liability comes with strict rules on creating and keeping records of the medical waste management process. So what do you need to know about record keeping requirements to keep your practice/facility on the right side of those rules?

For the administrator or office manager who is in charge of keeping all the medical waste management ducks in a row for her employer’s clinic or practice, keeping on top of employee medical waste compliance training is essential to that process. After all, failing to meet training requirements can have consequences. Poor training can endanger employees and the environment, and it can cost your employer dearly should a lapse in training standards result in citations and fines. So what do you need to know to ensure that everyone gets all the training they must have to keep your employer in line with federal and state requirements?

“Taking out the trash” is a lot less simple when it includes cast-off wound dressings, hypodermics used on patients with potentially infectious diseases, and tumors and other excised tissue. Different types of medical waste get handled according to their content and risk levels, but many people working in healthcare are unaware of what actually happens to the waste.

Facility-acquired infections are a big problem in healthcare circles, and preventing them is an issue that looms large for healthcare facilities – and not just for larger hospitals and nursing facilities. Small medical offices, clinics and other outpatient facilities must also be on guard against facility-acquired infections.

Medical waste disposal is serious business. Without its correct segregation, storage, containment, handling, and disposal, medical waste can potentially transmit infectious diseases or other hazardous risks to healthcare workers, the public, waste handlers, and the environment.