Challenges in the area of heath care waste management

Some of the sayings of swami Vivekananda, I recall having read - If you want to do something challenging which is good, you might face rejection, resentment, trial and acceptance. This goes very well with communication principles ? if you like to work in any area of Public Health. Health care waste is no exception to it. Before 1998, there were many small-scale incinerators in the city of Bangalore; segregation of waste was happening in some places and there was no focused training facility /attempts. Liquid waste management was not focused much and there were no common biomedical waste management facility in the state. Of course, there was no hazardous waste management facility also. Health care waste management as an environment safety issue, Health worker occupational safety issue and patient safety issue was not considered. There was no legisla-tion in place. Now, we have 17 Common Bi-omedical waste treatment facili-ties in the state and two in Banga-lore and more segregation is hap-pening. We now have more efforts towards training; we have certificate course on HCWM of-fered by IGNOU, we have a legis-lation ? Biomedical waste man-agement rules 1998, pollution control boards insisting on liquid waste management plants in large health care set ups, establishment of hazardous waste management facility at Dobbaspet/some in other states (Gujarath has six such facilities). However, there are still many challenges ahead. A list of some of the challenges with probable solutions is presented below.