Medical waste disposal is something that should never be done by someone untrained and uneducated in medical waste management Boca Raton.
If you are handling regulated medical waste or hazardous chemical wastes, then you will need to take the Safety Waste Management and/or Environmental Health training class. You will, however, only need to take the training related to your medical waste disposal duties. So, in other words, you will need to take both or just one of these classes.
These medical waste management classes today non longer need to be attended live. Instead, you can take them on-line via the Blackboard e-Education platform. A certificate in medical waste disposal that you get this way is accepted equally as if you went to the “real” classroom.
What Does it Mean “to Work With Medical Waste”?
Working with medical waste, whether it is hazardous or regulated means that you have to decide very carefully if that waste is hazardous or regulated, placing such waste in the appropriate medical waste disposal container, transporting medical waste from where it is generated (health care facility or laboratory) to the medical waste disposal plant, inspecting medical waste storage areas in your building and responding to spills of medical waste.
Basic Medical Waste Management Handling Requirements
Any person handling medical waste needs to be able to recognize such waste, both infectious and hazardous on sight and know how to properly and safely deal with it. One of the most important rules of handling medical waste is that a person responsible for this task should always wear appropriate PPE or personal protective equipment. This gear, which consists of a face mask or respirator mask (depending on whether there are any toxic fumes or evaporations from the medical waste), gown or apron, eye protection goggles, gloves and steel toed boots, is used to protect the handler’s skin lungs, eyes and any other part of his or her body that may come in contact with potentially infectious or otherwise hazardous medical waste.
A person handling medical waste will also need to, apart from protecting himself from the adverse effects of such waste, do his best to protect the others from it. This is done in two ways.
First of all, medical waste has to be disposed of in appropriate containers. In most cases medical waste is placed in red biohazard bags. Most types of solid medical wastes go in these bags. The two exceptions are sharps and liquids. Sharps, which include surgical instruments such as scalpels, dentist equipment like root file canals and other medical instruments used in health care for treating or diagnosing a patient, including needles, need to be placed in a durable hard plastic container. For bio-hazard liquids, a special bio-hazard container is used.
Once the medical waste bag or container is fulled, it is them taken to a well ventilated storage area, where medical waste would be protected from natural elements such as heat, cold rain or snow, as well as from scavenger animals, birds, rodents and insects. Also, only authorized personnel should have access to a medical waste storage area.
