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[FYI]Top Environmental Leaders in Health Care Address Respon -- healthaegis - (2847 Byte) 2007-5-04 周五, 10:03 (1978 reads) |
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作者：healthaegis 在 海归商务 发贴, 来自【海归网】 http://www.haiguinet.com
Medical waste found at landfill
COUNTY PROBES WHY HOSPITALS DIDN'T HANDLE BLOODY TRASH AS REQUIRED
By Barbara Feder Ostrov
Mercury News
Article Launched: 04/27/2007 01:30:17 AM PDT
Santa Clara County officials are investigating how three local hospitals sent untreated medical waste, including partly used bags of human blood, to a San Jose landfill in violation of state law.
Notices of violation were sent Thursday to O'Connor Hospital and Kaiser Permanente's Santa Teresa Hospital, both in San Jose, and Los Gatos Community Hospital. The county has not decided whether they will be fined or otherwise sanctioned, said Nicole Pullman, the county's hazardous materials program manager.
On seven occasions between April 6 and April 19, the hospitals sent untreated medical waste along with their regular trash to the Guadalupe landfill, where workers identified it during routine checks and alerted authorities.
Landfill officials required the three hospitals to remove about 30 tons of their regular trash that had been contaminated by the untreated medical waste. All had to hire specialized medical waste haulers to remove and treat the waste.
"My thoughts were, how could this happen?" said Ann Clarkson, a former nurse and current senior environmental health specialist for the county. "This was just incredible. What went wrong?"
Clarkson said she had not heard of any instances of medical waste being improperly dumped at a local landfill for years. For three hospitals to improperly deliver medical waste to the landfill seven times in two weeks seemed unusual, she said.
Pullman said the hospitals were quick to rectify the situation and are cooperating with the investigation.
O'Connor Hospital and Kaiser Permanente-Santa Teresa each sent tainted trash to the dump on three different days. On another day, landfill workers found untreated medical waste in a load from Los Gatos Community Hospital.
Pullman and Clarkson said the waste included bloody sheets and clothing, used tubing and other disposable medical instruments, in addition to the used bags of blood. No needles or syringes were seen.
Accounts differ greatly about the amount of medical waste that found its way to the dump.
Pullman said the waste totaled less than 100 pounds, but the Guadalupe landfill manager estimated it might be more.
Much higher tally
Marleen Wood, a manager for Sanitec Industries, a firm contracted to safely dispose of the medical waste from the landfill, said that of tens of thousands of pounds of trash delivered to a Sanitec transfer facility, about 70 percent was untreated waste, including bloody gauze and IV bags. Wood also said she noticed some patient billing records containing confidential information from Santa Teresa and O'Connor hospitals in the trash.
"To put it bluntly, you can't have that many stupid people at three hospitals," Wood said. "They suddenly lost all their training?"
State law requires medical waste to be sterilized before disposal to protect the workers who handle it and prevent the spread of disease. A worker jabbed with a contaminated needle, for example, could contract the HIV virus or hepatitis. Medical waste cannot be incinerated under California law, so it is treated with heat, steam or microwaves to sterilize it. The Guadalupe landfill can accept only medical waste that has been treated.
Joe Morse, who oversees the Guadalupe and Kirby landfills for owner Waste Management, said it's likely that small amounts of medical waste have been delivered unnoticed to local landfills for years.
California's landfills recently stepped up random checks for improper waste at the urging of state regulators. It was just such a check that flagged the first load of tainted waste, delivered to the Guadalupe landfill April 6 from Santa Teresa Hospital.
The trash was so contaminated with bloody material, he was "floored," Morse said. "It was shocking. It was easy to say, `Stop right there.'"
Landfill workers immediately called Santa Teresa officials, who rushed to the landfill to remove the trash. Morse estimated that of seven to eight tons of Santa Teresa's trash, nine 55-gallon drums of medical waste had to be removed. He did not know what the drums weighed. Kaiser brought the medical waste back to the hospital for treatment in its in-house autoclave machine, which sterilizes the waste with heat and steam.
Stepped-up inspections
The landfill then started checking all trash delivered by hospitals, requiring haulers to schedule trash drop-offs for inspections, Morse said.
That was when the landfill noted untreated medical waste in six more loads from the three hospitals. Although the hospitals were quick to hire haulers to remove the trash from the landfill, the landfill has temporarily stopped accepting any trash from the hospitals that does not come from their clerical offices, Morse said.
Typically, hospitals that do not treat their medical waste on-site contract with specialized trash haulers to treat and remove it. If it's been treated properly, it can be delivered to the Guadalupe landfill.
In these cases, Pullman said, specialized haulers were not involved. Rather, hospital workers improperly disposed of the untreated medical waste in non-medical trash, which was delivered to the landfill by the hospitals' regular trash haulers.
"We were just appalled and embarrassed," said Elizabeth Nikels, a spokeswoman for O'Connor Hospital. "This incident is very unfortunate."
She said the hospital is taking steps to figure out how the untreated waste found its way into the regular trash. The hospital has retrained workers on how to dispose of medical waste.
Santa Teresa is doing the same. "We have policies in place that require the very strict separation of medical waste from non-medical waste. In early April, those policies failed," said Terry Austen, who oversees Santa Teresa as senior vice president and area manager for Kaiser Permanente in San Jose.
The medical center, he said, is taking steps "to make sure this never happens again."
A representative of Los Gatos Community Hospital could not be reached for comment.
作者：healthaegis 在 海归商务 发贴, 来自【海归网】 http://www.haiguinet.com
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