Biomedical waste management in Ayurveda hospitals – current practices and future prospectives

ABSTRACT

Biomedical waste management is an integral part of traditional and contemporary system of health care.The paper focuses on the identification and classification of biomedical wastes in Ayurvedic hospitals,current practices of its management in Ayurveda hospitals and its future prospective. Databases likePubMed (1975e2017 Feb), Scopus (1960e2017), AYUSH Portal, DOAJ, DHARA and Google scholar weresearched. We used the medical subject headings ‘biomedical waste’ and ‘health care waste’ for identification and classification. The terms ‘biomedical waste management’, ‘health care waste management’alone and combined with ‘Ayurveda’ or ‘Ayurvedic’ for current practices and recent advances in thetreatment of these wastes were used. We made a humble attempt to categorize the biomedical wastesfrom Ayurvedic hospitals as the available data about its grouping is very scarce. Proper biomedical wastemanagement is the mainstay of hospital cleanliness, hospital hygiene and maintenance activities. Currentdisposal techniques adopted for Ayurveda biomedical wastes are e sewage/drains, incineration and landfill. But these methods are having some merits as well as demerits. Our review has identified a number ofinteresting areas for future research such as the logical application of bioremediation techniques inbiomedical waste management and the usage of effective micro-organisms and solar energy in wastedisposal.© 2017 Transdisciplinary University, Bangalore and World Ayurveda Foundation. Publishing Services byElsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http//creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).