Introduction: Community health nurses, who perform health care services at patients' homes, work in specific conditions, especially in terms of hygiene. To optimise the cleanliness conditions, they use a lot of disposable material (i.e. material for single use), which has become a general trend in health care. After use, this material must be discarded, which results in large quantities of waste. Waste management in community health nursing is therefore becoming a major problem also due to the increased number of curative activities performed in this line of work. Purpose: To explore the problem of waste generated during the treatment of patients by community health nurses, and to ascertain whether the waste is appropriately taken care of. Methods: During their clinical training, students of nursing were observing the work of community health nurses and how they deal with waste. All the data was recorded in the pre-prepared forms. Results: In the course of 35 visits of community nurses, 480 pieces of waste or 13.7 pieces of waste per visit were collected. Almost half of the waste was created while taking care of patients with wounds, and about one tenth in the preparation of medicines, prevention and control of infections, diagnostic and therapeutic interventions, and during excretion and discharge. The key finding arising from our research is that as much as 87% of the waste is taken care of by the patients themselves. As a result, a large amount of health care waste gets mixed with ordinary household waste. In addition, the collected infectious waste included 24 waste needles, of which only 67% were disposed of correctly. Discussion and conclusion: In reviewing the reasons why community health nurses dispose of only 13% of the waste created even though they should ensure proper disposal of all the waste generated during their work, we found out that they lack adequate facilities for waste management. During their work, excessive amounts of waste are generated, making it impossible for them to transport all of it with the few vehicles available to them. For the purposes of transporting themselves and the health care waste, only means of transport designated exclusively for the transport of health care waste should be used in accordance with the law. Just as transport is arranged for larger amounts of contaminated waste, disposal should be regulated for all other types of waste as well. Since the quantity of waste in general is expected to increase in the future, appropriate strategies need to be prepared in advance to solve the problem.
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