Addressing a meeting on waste treatment plants at health care facilities in the city, Pham Viet Thanh, head of the health department, said inspections would be carried out at the end of the year to ensure compliance with the order.
Strict action would be taken against those who are found polluting the environment by not installing the systems, he said.
The department will install medical wastewater treatment systems at health centres in 238 out of 322 wards and communes in the city by the end of this year. The rest will have them by the end of next year.
Preventive medicine centres in all districts in the city would have medical wastewater treatment systems by the end of this year, Thanh said.
In HCM City, every district has a hospital and a preventive medicine centre. Communes and wards have health centres.
For the health centres, the city People's Committee has tasked infrastructure management boards at the district level to oversee installation of medical wastewater treatment systems using Japanese technology, Thanh said.
Each health centre would have systems with the capacity of 2cu.m per day and the total capital for all the wards and communes was estimated at VND100 billion (US$4.8 million), he said.
Currently, most of the health centres discharge their wastewater into the city's common sewage pit.
The city's Department of Natural Resources and Environment said that hospitals in the city discharged around 23,000cu.m of medical wastewater, most of which was not treated.
HCM City last year had only 52 of 113 private and public hospitals with wastewater treatment systems meeting set standards. Forty of these 113 hospitals had the system but failed to meet the standard, including hospitals at the central level.
More than 7,200 small and large-sized health clinics only had rudimentary wastewater treatment systems.
Nguyen Tan Phong, deputy head of the HCM City University of Technology's Environment Faculty, told the Sai Gon Tiep Thi (Sai Gon Marketing) newspaper that medical wastewater contained 20 per cent of hazardous waste.
If this hazardous waste was not treated well, it was dangerous for the environment and posed a health risk for residents, he added.
Dang Ngoc Chanh, head of the HCM City Public Health and Hygiene Institute's environment health faculty, said that the institute last year took samples of wastewater from four hospitals with the standard wastewater treatment system and analysed them.
The results showed that all treated wastewater met bacterial standards but the ammoniac standards were double the limit, he said, adding that if the substance was discharged into rivers, lakes or ponds, it could kill fish and shrimp.
(VNS)