**3. Results**

The findings were coded using a coding framework which include the source of literature, country source, disciplines, topics covered, methods used and the common terminologies used all the details are discussed below (see the coding framework Supplementary Table S4).

#### *3.1. Characteristics of the Mapped Literature*

*Source of literature:* The majority of the studies N = 100 (89.3%), in this scoping review were published in journals, and 12 (10.7%) were student dissertations. There were more studies N = 100 (89.28%) from LMICs than from HICs N = 12 (10.71%). The studies from LMICs are divided into regions. For example, the Asian countries included: Bangladesh, China, India, Lao Republic, Malaysia, Pakistan, Philippines, Romania, Thailand, Kingdom of Bahrain, Nepal, Vietnam, Taiwan. African countries include, Algeria, Botswana, Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana, Libya, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe. The Middle East countries included: the kingdom of Buhrain, Iran, Jordan, and Palestine; further, there was Brazil from South America and Turkey from Europe (Turkey). The minority of the studies from HICs were from Croatia, Japan, the United Kingdom, Greece, Portugal, the United States of America, and Italy. All of these are summarized in Table 1.


**Table 1.** A summary table for all low and middle-income countries (LMICs) and high-income countries (HICs) with various terminologies used.


**Table 1.** *Cont.*

#### *3.2. Disciplines Represented by the Various Studies*

The 112 studies were from science-related disciplines ranging from administrative science and policy to process engineering. The studies covered various topics for example, 44 (39.3%) covered HCWM practices, 14 (12.5%) discussed the knowledge and attitudes of healthcare staff about HCWM, 13 (11.6%) addressed the segregation and quantification of HCW, 12 (10.7%) presented the risks associated with HCWM, 11 (9.8%) focused on HCW treatment and disposal options, nine (8.0%) reviewed existing policies on HCWM, and nine (8.0%) addressed models for HCWM. The majority 22 (19.6%) of the studies were cross-sectional studies followed by 16 mixed methods (14.3%), 13 literature reviews (11.6%), 13 quantitative surveys (11.6%), 11 case studies (9.8%), eight qualitative studies (7.1%), six experiments (5.4%), five document analyses (4.5%), two commentaries (1.8%) and three systematic reviews (2.8%).

#### *3.3. The Common Terminologies Used to Describe Healthcare Waste by Various Countries*

The WHO manual uses the term 'healthcare waste' to describe all of the waste resulting from healthcare activities. The common terminologies used by HICs are medical waste (4.46%), healthcare waste, and hospital waste (1.78% each), followed by clinical, biomedical, and hazardous waste, at 0.89% each. In the LMICs, biomedical waste was found to be the common terminology used with 32.14%, followed by healthcare waste (24.10%), medical waste (13.39%), hospital waste (10.71%), clinical waste (6.25%), and hazardous healthcare waste (2.67%), as summarized in Table 2.



#### *3.4. Categorization of Healthcare Waste*

The WHO manual categorizes HCW into non-hazardous and hazardous waste. All of the categories presented by the eligible studies from LMICs conformed to the WHO's categories despite using terminologies such as biohazardous or pathological waste to mean all of the waste that is capable of transmitting microbes, and non-biohazardous/non-pathological waste as waste that does not pose harm upon contact, as presented in Table 3.

On the other hand, the HICs categorizes all waste into five groups/classes using letters of the alphabet. These groups are Group A waste, which is all waste with human tissue including blood, animal carcasses, tissue from veterinary centers, hospitals, and laboratories. Group B waste consists of all discarded syringes needles, cartridges, broken glass, and any other contaminated disposable sharp instruments. Group C waste includes all microbiological cultures and all potentially infected waste from pathology departments such as clinical or research laboratories and post-mortem rooms. Group D waste are all of the pharmaceutical products and chemical wastes. Group E waste includes all

of the items that are used to dispose of urine, feces, body secretions, and excretions, as summarized in Table 4. Despite using letters of the alphabet to categorize HCW, the description of the HCW as well as the examples that are provided under each category align with those provided by the WHO manual.


**Table 4.** Classification of healthcare waste by high-income countries.

