By: Outpatient Surgery Magazine, Kaylan Anderson, RN, BSN
If you’re looking to bolster your sharps safety efforts, here are some key safety components to keep your surgery center injury-free:
Regular Audits
Perform a sharps safety audit each quarter to ensure all needle safety and infection prevention policies are being performed correctly and none of your staff become complacent, rush or cut corners — something that’s especially important when cases are on the rise. As cases increase, so does the risk for sharps injuries — all the more reason for quarterly audits.
Ongoing Training
Provide sharps prevention and bloodborne pathogen safety training during new employee orientation, but also provide a yearly refresher course for other staff.
When it comes to training and educational sessions, try to lean on the expertise of your staff. Encourage them to use these trainings as a platform to speak up about what they’ve experienced. Maybe one of your nurses suffered an injury or had a close call at a previous facility and could provide invaluable advice for the rest of the staff. Your frontline staff is a wealth of knowledge and experience; you just need to make sure to provide a safe, welcoming space for them to share their insights.
Training doesn’t need to be overly complicated, but it should explain to your staff why your protocols and policies are in place — and what the risks are for unsafe practices.
For instance, approximately 385,000 needlesticks and other sharps-related injuries affect healthcare personnel, according to the CDC. If your staff understands why your protocols are in place, they are more likely to follow them. And if you receive pushback from any staff during training, that could be helpful as well. After all, if the staff is grumbling over sharps safety protocols, how can you expect them to get on board and how many other policies are they not going to follow?
Proper Disposal
While most people think of sharps injuries as incidents that occur during handoffs in the middle of surgery, plenty of problems occur during the disposal of these items, as well. That’s why you must ensure sharps are properly disposed of and only placed in puncture-proof sharps containers immediately after use.
Sharps and bloodborne pathogen safety training is only effective if, no pun intended, it sticks with your staff after the education is finished.
Remember, anything that could cut, prick or injure staff — such as a glass ampule — should never be thrown away in the garbage can. You also want to be on the lookout for corner-cutting during the disposal phase and regularly remind your staff not to rush when sharps are involved, as this increases the risk of injury. Recommend that they take a three-second pause to stop and think over their decision when they’re deciding where to dispose of sharps. Just this simple reminder to slow down can significantly reduce the rate of injuries.
For safety purposes, lay out your operating rooms with a clear path to every sharps disposal container. In pre-op rooms, place sharps disposal containers right next to the beds. Anesthesia carts should also have sharps containers mounted on the sides for easy disposal.
Safe Handling
Staff should be taught how to use all sharps safety devices. For instance, when starting an IV, retract the needle on a safety-engineered device as soon as the line is established. Providers who use needle drivers to load and unload scalpel blades always keep the blade’s tip pointing away from them. When it comes to needle safety and recapping needles, try to avoid recapping needles whenever possible.
Train your staff to recap using a single hand. That way, a provider secures it with their other hand. This method avoids a common cause of needlestick injuries that can occur when staff hold the needle in one hand and try to place the cap on it with the other hand.
Hands-Free Passing
Finally, all the sharps in your ORs should be kept in a neutral zone located in one corner of the sterile field until the case is complete. A scrub tech may pass them to the surgeon, but a surgeon will never pass them back to the scrub tech; they will always be placed back in the neutral zone. This allows providers to be more aware of where sharps are placed and when they’re removed from the designated neutral zone, thus further reducing the risk of sharps injuries.
Preventing sharps-related injuries is a crucial component of staff safety, something that ultimately impacts patient safety, as well. One sharps injury is one too many.
Make it your mission to meticulously follow the dedicated policies and procedures that have been established for employee safety.
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