Lagos State Hospital Waste Management Practices: A Descriptive Overview with Stakeholders’ Role and Key Recommendations

Background: Waste generation and its disposal is an essential issue in the sustainability of the environment and the planet’s future. Waste management is essential across sectors, likewise the health sector. Therefore, there is a need to employ extra care and attention to handling waste generated from healthcare facilities to avoid the dangers of poor biomedical waste management. We carried out this study to examine the waste management practice in healthcare facilities in Lagos State. Methods: The study was a descriptive survey carried out in one-thousand two hundred and fifty-six (1256) healthcare facilities in Lagos State. Nine hundred sixty-nine (969) of these facilities are located in urban areas, while two hundred and eighty-seven (287) are rural. The facilities studied are government/public health facilities (15.45%), private-for-profit facilities (82.88%), NGOs, Mission/Faith-Based medical facilities (1.67%). The data collected were analyzed using descriptive statistics. Specifically, we utilized bar charts, frequency, and percentage. Result: The result shows that 98.4% (1236) of the studied facilities are registered with the Lagos State Waste Management Authority (LAWMA), while 1.6% (20) are not registered. 98.5% (191) of the 194 government-owned facilities, 98.5% (1025) of the 1041 private-for-profit facilities, and 98.2% (20) of the 21 NGOs/faith-based health facilities are registered with Lagos State Waste Management Authority. The result also shows that 94% of the healthcare facilities studied in Lagos State use color-coded waste bags to segregate waste at the point of origin. 58.7% of the facilities use red-colored bags, 33.3% use yellow-colored bags, 10.7% use black-colored bags, and 1.3% use brown biohazard bags for segregating Infectious waste. Also, 34.2% of the health facilities in Lagos state use red-colored bags, 36.9% use yellow-colored bags, 11% use black-colored bags, and 4.1% use brown-colored bags to segregate their hazardous waste. Conclusion: Some healthcare facilities in Lagos State do not follow the recommended guidelines for medical waste segregation. Waste generated is not appropriately segregated at the point of origin into the recommended colored bags/bins in some facilities. Thus, a policy and procedure regulating healthcare waste are mandatory. It is important to regularly train healthcare workers on proper waste management practices and encourage staff to read and apply WHO rules in managing healthcare waste. Healthcare personnel should realize that hazardous material is a potential cause of a public disaster.

Authorization Management Framework Based on Joint Trust-Risk Evaluation

Authorization management is important precondition and foundation for coordinating and resource sharing in open networks. Recently, authorization based on trust is widely used whereby access rights to shared resource are granted on the basis of their trust relation in distributed environment. Nevertheless, dynamic change of the status of credential and chain of trust induces to uncertainty of trust relation. Considering uncertainty of authorization and analyzing deficiency of authorization model only based on trust, we proposes joint trust-risk evaluation and build the model based on fuzzy set theory, and make use of the membership grade of fuzzy set to express joint trust-risk relation. Finally, derivation principle and constraint principle of joint trust-risk relationships are presented. The authorization management model is defined based on joint trust-risk evaluation, proof of compliance and separation of duty are analyzed. The proposed model depicts not only trust relationship between principals, but also security problem of authorization.

A Quantum Authorization Management Protocol Based on EPRPairs

Quantum authorization management(QAM)is the quantum scheme for privilege management infrastructure(PMI)problem.Privilege management(authorization management)includes authentication and authorization.Authentication is to verify a user’s identity.Authorization is the process of verifying that a authenticated user has the authority to perform a operation,which is more fine-grained.In most classical schemes,the authority management center(AMC)manages the resources permissions for all network nodes within the jurisdiction.However,the existence of AMC may be the weakest link of the whole scheme.In this paper,a protocol for QAM without AMC is proposed based on entanglement swapping.In this protocol,Bob(the owner of resources)authenticates the legality of Alice(the user)and then shares the right key for the resources with Alice.Compared with the other existed QAM protocols,this protocol not only implements authentication,but also authorizes the user permissions to access certain resources or carry out certain actions.The authority division is extended to fin-grained rights division.The security is analyzed from the four aspects:the outsider’s attack,the user’s attack,authentication and comparison with the other two QAM protocols.