Infrastructure recovery after the devastating 2010 Haiti earthquake continues to advance thanks to the actions of the international community and of course the Haitians themselves.

Most recently, a new waste management project at Justinien Hospital was marked by the first breaking of ground to the construction phase of a replacement waste management facility. With roads and other infrastructure damage after the earthquake, it had become necessary to burn clinical and other wastes in the backyard of the Justinien Hospital. This exposed the staff, patients and visitors to a number of obvious risks, as well as promoting wider hygiene problems and risks of infestation.

The Justinien Hospital is a two-hundred-fifty-bed, government-run teaching hospital serving the needs of Cap-Haïtien and the surrounding communities of northern Haiti, an estimated 825,000 people. The new development is not ideal, but is a substantial improvement on current arrangements. With pressures on healthcare greater than ever before, waste output must be high. This project promotes a sanitary and healthy environment at the public hospital by:

• Providing a safe collection location for the waste that the hospital generates
• Providing access for safe removal of the waste from the hospital grounds
• Allowing for better management of the waste, and an enhanced image of the hospital in the community

Inevitably, the project is limited in scope.It is intended to assist the hospital in its ability to manage the solid waste it generates by constructing a space to set out and store the hospital’s waste in a sanitary fashion, and by creating an opening in the back of the hospital giving daily access to a truck to carry it to a dump.

That is a significant limitation, but it is already one big step forward. We must hope that other Haitian hospitals can do likewise, but for each of them it is the first of many steps toward improvement in waste treatment that avoids, at the earliest opportunity, landfill of those wastes.

see also: http://konbitsante.org/field-report/waste-management-project-justinien-hospital-breaks-ground