Are We Still in the Dark Ages of Sharps Safety?

“There has been a huge focus on patient safety in the past four or five years, which has resulted in much work around ‘just cultures,’ personal accountability, and holding others accountable for their actions,” says Barbara DeBaun, RN, MSN, CIC, improvement advisor for BEACON, the Bay Area Patient Safety Collaborative. “I wonder if this has had an impact on how staff views their own personal safety and how their behavior affects not only themselves but their colleagues. I don’t know if this has been studied or if there is any evidence around this, but I do think it’s worth exploring. As an example, facilities are expecting staff to ‘speak up’ if they see another staff member not wash his/her hands, or fail to follow ‘the bundle’ when inserting central lines. I wonder if this has had a positive effect on staff who may now feel empowered to hold others accountable to personal safety too.”

Rose is a firm believer in positive change necessitating an institutional culture shift. “We believe that the partnership established prior to and during the legislative years with safety advocacy groups and our clinical end users has demonstrated a significant shift in both attitude and compliance to the selection and use of sharps safety devices, whereby the majority of institutions have created a ‘culture of safety.’ That being said, as a manufacturer monitoring the marketplace and the technology embedded within safety devices, we see areas where the ‘culture of safety’ has not been fully embraced, partly driven by economic considerations or by perceptions that safety is either not needed or the devices available do not meet the clinical needs where a non-safety device may still be in use.”

“Healthcare workers must be provided with the right tools and equipment, but even when they have them, behavioral issues get in the way,” Clarke says. “We see increased workloads impacting worker safety; something we have grown to expect from this is that they put patient safety ahead of their own. If it’s a question of tending to the patient or worrying about their own safety, the patient usually comes first.”

Education about and training in the proper use of safety-engineered devices is critical to ensuring that HCWs can protect themselves concurrently with meeting their patients’ clinical needs.