Paper
Friday, 21 July 2006
This presentation is part of : Strategies to Improve Adult Health
Safe Needle Device Implementation in a Multi-Site Healthcare Organization
Prescillia P. S. Chua, MSc, Waqar A. Mughal, MSc, and Rita T. Ciconte, MSc. Workplace Health, Fraser Health, Surrey, BC, Canada
Learning Objective #1: Associate the decrease in needlestick injury rates to safe needle devices.
Learning Objective #2: Identify barriers and issues to consider when developing an implementation plan for changing over to safe needle devices.
Healthcare workers who use or may be exposed to needles are at increased risk of needlestick injuries, which can lead to serious or fatal infections with viruses such as hepatitis B, hepatitis C, or human immunodeficiency virus. To decrease rates of needlesticks, a large healthcare organization in British Columbia implemented a change to safety hypodermic needles and IV catheters. A task force was created to address staff issues and ensure departments were provided with devices, education and documentation necessary for effective and safe use. Situations were identified where the safe needle devices interfered with clinical techniques. Safe needle devices were phased-in across 12 major sites from January to August 2005. All blood and body fluid exposures were tracked in the employer’s OH&S injury database. Pre-intervention sharps incidents were extracted from January to October 2004; post-intervention from January to October 2005. Univariate analysis of variance was performed to compare pre- and post-intervention monthly sharps incident rates. P-values were set a priori at α=0.05. Overall, rates of percutaneous injury decreased since the implementation of safe needle devices from 3.8 to 1.5 incidents per month (p<0.001). Decreases were observed in all but two categories of sharps. The largest decrease was seen in the sharps category “unknown” (10.4 to 0.5); “IV catheter” decreased from 1.8 to 1.0, whereas “disposable syringe” increased from 2.9 to 3.7. This increase may have been caused by inaccurate coding of the type of sharp used at the time of injury during the pre-intervention period, an important implication for any organization wishing to implement and evaluate the use of safe sharps. A number of behavioural issues were also observed during the intervention period, including hoarding of old devices. The majority of departments/units within organization’s acute care sites have now completely switched to safety hypodermic needles and IV catheters.

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