No Place for a Sick Person
Did you ever notice hospital employees pushing carts around a hospital? They are everywhere; in the halls, in the elevators and maybe even in a patient’s room. It seems you can’t get beyond the glittering and welcoming main entrance before you come the moving or temporarliy abandoned, ubiquitous cart.
Most carts contents are probably somewhat innocuous, relatively harmless waste or dirty laundry, left over meals or some other kind of common refuse many of us would not think twice about. However, some of those carts may hold potentially life threatening materials,(RMW), which are byproducts of medical procedures; meaning blood, other body parts, medical instruments and bandages, etc. Is there a proximity exposure concern? Absolutely! If the waste is not processed on-site, does the stored waste also present risk?
The old adage that a hospital is no place for a sick person (or a healthy one for that matter) has never been truer. Visitors, patients and hospital employees are put at risk on a daily basis by the small percentage of mishandled medical waste, or the large volume of stored medical waste.