Experiences in Dealing with Medical Waste: A Meta-synthesis

Background: Health care staff may experience in dealing with medical waste in their health care activities. The experiences are various and challenging, ranging from producing the waste to disposing of it. Objectives: This study aimed to analyze and synthesize the findings of existing qualitative researches related to experiences of health care staff in dealing with medical waste. Methods: This meta-synthesis collected recent research published from 2013 up to 2019. The articles were searched using online databases: Proquest, EBSCO, CINAHL, Springer, and Pubmed. The keywords using in the search were medical waste, hospital waste, health care waste, healthcare professionals, healthcare workers, and qualitative. There were 381 articles found from the search. Joanna Briggs Institute Critical Appraisal Checklist for Qualitative Research was used to assess the articles. Six articles were finally included and synthesized using the meta-ethnographic approach. Results: Three themes emerged from the study: consequence of health care, ways to handle medical waste, and obstacles in managing medical waste. Conclusion: Medical waste is inevitable and collaboration, as well as cooperation among health care staff and stakeholders is needed to manage medical waste properly.