Every healthcare practice should know how to complete a pre-acceptance waste audit. It’s an essential part of your disposal workflows and means that your healthcare waste can be safely and efficiently managed, tracked, and disposed of.
It is entirely the responsibility of the healthcare practice to make sure that a pre-acceptance audit is carried out for their premises, and it must be completed in person.
Healthcare professionals must carry out audits regularly. They also need to understand the need for comprehensive and accurate information on a variety of topics.
Perform regular audits
Carrying out pre-acceptance audits routinely allows you to maintain compliance and note any significant and relevant changes that have happened to your practice’s workflows.
Healthcare professionals must conduct an audit every 12 months if they produce more than 5 tonnes of clinical waste in a year. This reduces to performing an audit every 2 or 5 years, dependent on the services provided if they produce less than 5 tonnes of clinical waste in that time.
There are several reasons why you may need to carry out a pre-acceptance audit. These include:
- The time between audit completions has exceeded
- You have made a significant change to your workflows
- The type of waste you are creating has changed
- The waste you are producing is found to not match with a previous pre-acceptance audit.
Keeping your information up-to-date allows waste management teams to treat waste products safely. It also allows them to assess whether they can help you from a technical and legal standpoint.
As a practice that cares about the effective disposal of its refuse, this is your first step to ensuring it can be treated safely and effectively.
Information to include
Your pre-acceptance audit will require complete information on your practice’s disposal workflows.
Healthcare practices must work with the colour-coded waste guidance as per the HTM 07-01. Doing so will allow you to consistently identify and segregate your waste in daily workflows. It also makes completing pre-acceptance audits more straightforward.
The audit must include information about the practice itself, the care it provides, and information on the audit such as when it was carried out, by whom, and how this was done.
A healthcare practice must break down the waste types produced within each area of the premises. These can be identified by the colour coding system, and will likely include:
- Infectious waste items (yellow or orange waste streams)
- Cytotoxic and cytostatic contaminated material (purple waste stream)
- Sharps (yellow or orange waste streams)
- Pharmaceuticals or controlled drugs (blue waste stream)
- Non-hazardous offensive waste (yellow and black, or tiger, waste streams)
- Anatomical waste (red waste stream)
- Dental amalgam and gypsum (white waste stream).
Every type of waste product your practice creates must be accounted for and you must also stipulate whether the waste has come from a human or animal source.
If your practice needs to make changes because of the findings of the pre-acceptance audit, these must also be recorded.
Receiving help for your pre-acceptance audit
Pre-acceptance audits can, at first, seem complex and overwhelming. Consulting with a waste management company like Initial Medical will be beneficial. Our teams are experts in the safe and environmentally-friendly management of healthcare waste, and can handle all of the waste produced in healthcare environments. Making clinical waste processes simple to understand is our passion, and our teams are on hand for support at a moment’s notice.
A pre-acceptance audit is essential when managing your workflows. With regular and comprehensive reviews, you can be sure to follow each obligation you have for safer disposal.
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