Ten Years Safer. But Safe Enough?

It wasn’t enough to simply tell healthcare practitioners and nurses to be careful around needles and syringes. When the Needlestick Safety and Prevention Act was signed into law on Nov. 6, 2000, its intent was for employers to identify, evaluate and implement safer medical devices. Today, many experts agree that healthcare settings have become safer environments for clinicians, nurses, other workers and patients. At the same time, they question whether more needs to be done.

Healthcare workers and their patients deserve the safest conditions possible, according to Elizabeth Ann Vencill, MHA, MBA, CLS, MT (ASCP), SLS (ASCP), PBT (ASCP), Memorial Medical Center, Modesto, Calif. Thanks to the Needlestick Safety and Prevention Act, clinicians such as Vencill have moved much closer to realizing this goal. “The Needlestick Safety and Prevention Act enabled healthcare organizations to devote resources, both financial and personnel, to thinking about the effects that needlestick injuries had on the employee population,” she says. “We realized we could not ask healthcare personnel to continue to put themselves at such risk [for contamination from HIV/AIDS and other bloodborne pathogens], or we would [deprive] ourselves of these services.”

"That’s no exaggeration," Vencill continues. “Some of my friends [and coworkers] became ill and later died as the result of being laboratorians, nurses and doctors, because our practices in the 1980s and 1990s were not as stringent as they are today,” she explains. Many other friends and colleagues left the healthcare industry to avoid such risks, she adds.

Needlestick Safety and Prevention Act enabled clinicians and healthcare employers to reflect “and to discover that simply saying to someone, ‘You must be more careful when performing a random healthcare action’ was not enough to save their lives,” Vencill continues. As a result, the industry is “fabulously safer,” she says, and physicians, nurses and healthcare workers have safer tools at their disposal, such as single-use test tube holders and clave connectors for needleless access to IV tubing.

At Memorial Medical Center, seven years ago the needlestick injury rate to the phlebotomy staff alone was about six incidents annually, according to Vencill. Today, while the medical center’s number of beds has increased from 350 to 423, and the phlebotomy staff has increased from between two and four full time employees to between three and six full time employees, needlestick injuries rarely, if ever, occur.

“This means that our staff’s families will not face the terror of uncertainty from a needlestick injury,” says Vencill. “It means the hospital will not incur the expense of needlestick injury mitigation. There is less turnover of employees from [the fear of injury] and fewer immediate care costs, [including] blood tests, call backs and doctor visits and employee health visits.”