Environmental inspectors on Tuesday started a one-week inspection of wastewater treatment at 15 large hospitals in HCMC following a recent report by the municipal environment authority that many large clinics here neither have wastewater facilities nor treat wastewater properly.
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| Many large clinics in Ho Chi Minh City neither have wastewater facilities nor treat wastewater properly. |
The inspection will be done at some large State-run hospitals such as An Binh, Nguyen Tri Phuong, Trung Vuong and others.
As observed by the Daily during the inspection at Nguyen Tri Phuong Hospital on Tuesday morning, the wastewater being discharged into the city’s drainage system still looked yellowish and emitted stinking odor, though this 500-bed clinic said its wastewater facility was capable of treating 500 cubic meters a day.
A responsible doctor at Nguyen Tri Phuong Hospital said that it had built the facility in 1998, and the hospital was asking for approval to upgrade the treatment capacity of the facility up to 700 cubic meters a day.
Inspector Thai Hoang Vu told the Daily during the inspection that many large hospitals still failed to treat wastewater because their facilities constructed many years ago were becoming obsolete or overloaded.
While many public hospitals are ignoring the requirement to build wastewater facilities, most private clinics have already built the facilities for the good treatment of discharged wastewater, he said.
According to a recent report issued by the city’s Department of Natural Resources and Environment, only 49 out of 113 hospitals around the city have built and operated their own wastewater facilities properly, while 23 hospitals have no facilities and 41 others still fail to treat the discharged wastewater properly though they have such facilities.
All 133 hospitals in the city are discharging some 23,000 cubic meters of wastewater into the environment each day.
The report said although many public hospitals have been in service for many years, they are still the process of preparing projects for building and upgrading wastewater facilities. These include Nguyen Trai Hospital, Saigon General Hospital, Dermatology Hospital, Tumor Hospital, Trung Vuong Hospital, Children Hospital 2, and Tu Du Hospital among others.
