Poster Presentation
Friday, July 13, 2007
9:30 AM - 10:15 AM
Friday, July 13, 2007
3:15 PM - 4:00 PM
Development of a Comprehensive Evaluation Tool for a Safe Sharps Program
Waqar A. Mughal, BSc, MSc, Prescillia P. S. Chua, MSc, and Leah Thomas-Olson, BKin. Workplace Health, Fraser Health, Surrey, BC, Canada
| Learning Objective #1: identify the critical components to include in an effective safe sharps program. |
| Learning Objective #2: recognize barriers and facilitators to use of safety engineered needles in acute care settings. |
Needlestick injuries (NSIs) are a recognized source of exposure to bloodborne pathogens for nurses. Historically, interventions to prevent NSIs have been attempted to minimize exposure of nurses to bloodborne pathogens via contaminated sharps. The literature identifies a number of important factors that are integral to the success of NSI prevention strategies, including maintaining a comprehensive sharps injury database, hazard risk assessment of needlestick injury trends, encouraging the reporting of needlestick incidents, educating and training users, and creating a better safety culture. The current body of research indicates that the evaluation of safety engineered needle (SEN) programs has focused on a range of outcomes of interest to the researchers. There has been only one study published recently that has demonstrated a comprehensive approach to evaluation. However gaps remain in the analysis, namely the inclusion of adverse events to patients, as well as the contributory roles of organizational factors. The objective of this project is to develop a comprehensive set of validated measures of program effectiveness for a SEN program in a large health authority. This set of measures will include perceptions of program performance and objective measures of program compliance. These measures will then be validated in a cross-sectional study against departmental NSI rates. The research project involves a participatory action research methodology involving Canadian Registered Nurses that use SENs as a regular part of their work in various acute care units across the organization. Qualitative analysis will be used to develop a measurement scale of SEN program performance, and standard quantitative methods for scale validation and cross-sectional sub-sample comparisons. Objective measures of program performance will also be captured, and an assessment of convergent validity will be conducted in comparing scale scores and captured objective measures to rates of NSIs in the work environments, sick time usage and overtime usage.