Journal of

Background: Lack of enough supervision, wrong and partial planning in the part of hospital residuals management cause high volume of production from variety of residuals which controlling them impose high costs to every society. In order to improve hospital wastes management, implementing a system of environmental management like ISO14001 can improve the environmental performance of organization and introduce the ways of solving problems to managers. The main objective of this study was to identify and prioritize the effective factors in the implementation of ISO 14001 and the benefits of its implementation in hospitals of Tehran.

Methods: In this study, after the identification of success factors and benefits of ISO 14001 implementation in hospitals of Tehran, the method of analytical hierarchy process is used in order to understand the importance and relative priority of these successful important factors and their benefits.

Results: Results show that the most important successful factors, based on the importance, are management commitment, education and training, communications and community relations and documentation and control.  Also, the most important benefits, of ISO 14001 implementation, are cost reduction in waste management, increasing the awareness and commitment of staff, risk management practices improvement and work process and procedures improvement.

Conclusion: Findings of the study indicate that which success factors of ISO 14001 requires more attention by managers and are in priority while implementing them.