A System Dynamics Approach for Hospital Waste Management in a City in a Developing Country: The Case of Nablus, Palestine

Hospitals and health centers provide a variety of healthcare services and normally generate hazardous waste as well as general waste. General waste has a similar nature to that of municipal solid waste and therefore could be disposed of in municipal landfills. However, hazardous waste poses risks to public health, unless it is properly managed. The hospital waste management system encompasses many factors, i.e., number of beds, number of employees, level of service, population, birth rate, fertility rate, and not in my back yard (NIMBY) syndrome. Therefore, this management system requires a comprehensive analysis to determine the role of each factor and its influence on the whole system. In this research, a hospital waste management simulation model is presented based on the system dynamics technique to determine the interaction among these factors in the system using a software package, ithink. This model is used to estimate waste segregation as this is important in the hospital waste management system to minimize risk to public health. Real data has been obtained from a case study of the city of Nablus, Palestine to validate the model. The model exhibits wastes generated from three types of hospitals (private, charitable, and government) by considering the number of both inpatients and outpatients depending on the population of the city under study. The model also offers the facility to compare the total waste generated among these different types of hospitals and anticipate and predict the future generated waste both infectious and non-infectious and the treatment cost incurred

An optimized artificial neural network model for the prediction of rate of hazardous chemical and healthcare waste generation at the national level

This paper presents a development of general regression neural network (a form of artificial neural network) models for the prediction of annual quantities of hazardous chemical and healthcare waste at the national level. Hazardous waste is being generated from many different sources and therefore it is not possible to conduct accurate predictions of the total amount of hazardous waste using traditional methodologies. Since they represent about 40% of the total hazardous waste in the European Union, chemical and healthcare waste were specifically selected for this research. Broadly available social, economic, industrial and sustainability indicators were used as input variables and the optimal sets were selected using correlation analysis and sensitivity analysis. The obtained values of coefficients of determination for the final models were 0.999 for the prediction of chemical hazardous waste and 0.975 for the prediction of healthcare and biological hazardous waste. The predicting capabilities of the models for both types of waste are high, since there were no predictions with errors greater than 25%. Also, results of this research demonstrate that the human development index can replace gross domestic product and in this context even represent a better indicator of socio-economic conditions at the national level