Paper Title
Assessment of Issues Affecting the Proper Practice of Healthcare Waste Management Systems in Lae’s Angau Memorial General Hospital: An AHP Approach

Abstract
Healthcare Waste Management still remains as one of the major challenges for Healthcare Facilities in developing countries like Papua New Guinea (PNG) to address in the effort to match world standards. Since healthcare wastes are hazardous in nature, correct practices for its management such asproper handling, treatment, and disposal of this waste is seen as a necessity to prevent the spread of diseases and infections. Healthcare facilities in PNG need to isolate areas of priority within their facility as a step forward in order to fully adopt the World Health Organisation (WHO) standard for proper healthcare waste management system. A better strategy and planning is important to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of healthcare waste management in these facilities. A multi-criteria decision making technique, Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP), which utilises a multi-level hierarchical structure consists of objective, criteria, pairwise comparisons of these criteria and alternatives is applied in theassessment of various factors affecting implementation ofappropriate healthcare waste treatment technology. The input from various medical experts has been used in a pairwise comparison matrix in order to rank the issues relating to healthcare waste management. The results of the study could behelpful in prioritizing the course of action to address these issue effectively. Keywords - Papua New Guinea (PNG), Angau Memorial General Hospital (AMGH), Healthcare Waste Management (HCWM), Healthcare Facilities (HCF), Healthcare Waste (HCW), Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP).