Abstract

Infectious and health care waste dramatically increasing due to the varieties of health care activities. This aims to identify problems and the health risk of worker who work with the infectious and health care waste transportation from hospital by private transport sector (PTS). The cross-sectional study was applied to the factors effecting with the outcome. 13 PTSs and 127 workers were employed in this study. The results found that: total of 127 workers from 13 PTSs in Thailand , among this 86.6% of workers were male, mean age of 31 years old, and the mean of working with infection and health care waste of 5.03 years. The main job specification was health care waste collector of 57.5%, drivers of 26%, both driver and collector of 16.5%. Only 38.6% was trained (control, precaution and protection) by the Ministry of Public Health (MoPH). A part one year later, the worker had an accident or injury (punch with needle or other sharp) from infectious and health care waste during working 42.5%, 37.8% have had contaminated or touch with the infectious fluid, 18.9% had traffic accident (car turnover, clash, offside cone) and 8.3%had the infectious and health care waste or leachates flood pour out from vehicle or container. The factors associated with risk of the health of the infectious and health care waste worker taken into account of affect of other factors, it were found that prevention and precaution training, job position, age and yearly health check were statistical significant with the health risk, respectively (OR=4.61, 95%CI=0.26 to 1.44, p=0.01) job position (OR=3.68, 95%CI=1.09 to 12.35, p=0.05), Age (OR=2.97, 95% CI=0.16 to 48.49, p=0.01) and yearly health check (OR=0.96, 95% CI=0.34 to 2.72, p=0.01).