Health care waste management in Palestine is driven by a number of concerns about potential health and environmental impacts. Indeed, some improvements have been made in hospitals and in the legal framework since the adoption of the Medical Waste Management by-law in 2012.

Since December 2020, the EU funded “Water and Environment Support (WES) in the ENI Neighbourhood South Region” project has been providing technical assistance to the Environment Quality Authority (EQA) aiming at further improvement in health care waste management in Palestine. The specific objectives of the mission are to support Palestine in the update of the Master Plan with its Roadmap for health care waste, to develop a contingency / emergency plan to be executed in crisis situations, and to reinforce capacities of different actors to improve management practices of health care waste.

Following a first round of Consultation that was held in November 2022, WES organised a second Consultation followed by a Training Workshop from 16 to 18 May 2023, in Ramallah, Palestine.

The objective of the workshop was to present and discuss further the revised Master Plan for Healthcare Waste Management and the Contingency Plan for Medical Waste Management, to showcase related practices, and to train officials on how to improve management practices of health care waste.

More than 30 officials from the Ministry of Health, Environment Quality Authority, Ministry of Local Government, along with environment inspectors and health care waste operators participated in this consultation and training workshop.

By the end of this 3-day event, the participants to this workshop and the trainees were introduced to the content of the revised Master Plan for Healthcare Waste Management and its contingency/emergency plan to be executed in crisis situations (outbreaks, conflicts, earthquakes, pandemics, etc.), and informed on the effective standard operating procedures of medical waste (on-site storage, transportation, treatment and disposal).

This WES environmental activity in Palestine is implemented with the support of the Association of Cities and Regions for Sustainable Resource Management (ACR+), Royal Haskoning DHV, LDK Consultants Global EEIG, and the Mediterranean Information Office for Environment, Culture and Sustainable Development (MIO-ECSDE).