Knowledge and Practices of Health-Care Waste Management among Health Workers in Lassa Fever Treatment Facility in Southeast Nigeria.

The threat of endemic, emerging, and reemerging infectious diseases, especially the viral hemorrhagic fevers demands effective health-care waste management (HCWM) among health-care workers. The study was intended to assess the knowledge and practices of HCWM among the cleaning staff in a Lassa fever (LF) treatment facility.This was a cross-sectional descriptive study of 234 cleaning staff of Federal Teaching Hospital Abakaliki recruited by systematic random sampling. Data collection was with semi-structured questionnaires. Knowledge and practices of respondents were assessed using cutoff score of 75%; score of 75% and above being interpreted as good and <75% as poor. Data were analyzed using Epi™ Info Version 7.2.There were 177 (75.6%) female and 57 (24.4%) male cleaning staff with a mean age of 33.4 years (±8.3). Among all the respondents, 18 (7.7%) had no formal education, while others had varying levels of education (primary, 43 [18.4%]; secondary, 133 [56.8%]; tertiary, 40 [17.1%]). Only 134 (57.3%) of the respondents had ever been trained on HCWM, of which 77 (57.5%) of them were trained in 2018. The proportion of respondents with good knowledge of HCWM was 41.5%. In addition, only 83 (35.5%) properly categorized the body parts, body fluids, and fetuses as pathological waste. About one-third, 77 (33.3%), had knowledge of steps in HCWM and 45.3% knew of diseases transmitted through health-care waste with 171 (62.8%) identifying LF as one of the diseases. The proportion of respondents with good practices of HCWM was 53.9% with only 131 (56.0%) segregating waste in specified color-coded containers. Among the factors examined, none was significantly associated with knowledge and practice of participants on HCWM.The proportions of the cleaning staff with good knowledge and practices of HCWM were low. There is a need to train and retrain hospital staff on proper HCWM as well as need for proper supervision and monitoring.