[Waste management as part of self-care: an in-hospital training?]

As a health care professional, I feel concerned by the gap existing between urban and hospital practice concerning the management of waste, even when it is the same objects which are disposed. In the daily practice of the hospital care givers, the patients' education is mainly focused on the prevention measures or the care techniques to be adopted. The waste dumping modes are very seldom taken in consideration, despite the fact that everybody is afraid at the discovery of care material abandoned in a public place. That is why the following hypothesis was formulated: "The better the patient is educated, the better he will manage his self-care waste." The methods used for this diploma work are the documentary research and the investigation interviews with all the actors in and out of the hospital concerned by the patients' education and/or the management of care waste. The pilot study was conducted by means of enquiry questionnaires. It was focused on the hospital care givers and on the insulin-dependent diabetic patients who practice their self-care, through the enquiry technique "before-after" The aims of this research were to assess the quality of the education given by the hospital care giving staff on the management of self-care waste and the impact of this training on the patients. The drawing up of a system of reference (at the end of this research investigation work) should enable the improvement of the present situation. The small size of the sample used for the pilot study did not enable us to invalidate or confirm our working hypotheses. But the results obtained during out pilot study showed the bad quality of the training given by the hospital care givers and the inadequacy of the patients' procedure. That is why our professional project is based on an updating of the knowledge of the hospital care givers for the management of the self-care material in order to improve the quality of the care given by a hospital team and its adequation to the needs of the population at which it is aimed.