A Batley pensioner is struggling to have her used diabetic needles collected. Describing her ‘nightmare’ to the local press with fears about the accumulation of sharps boxes in her home [presumably, only that she might trip over one of them], she reports that syringes were left to pile up at her home for two months.

She uses three needles every day to keep her diabetes under control. The 68-year-old puts each used syringe into a sharps bin which is supposed to be collected by Kirklees Council when it is full. But the authority ignored her pleas to remove the bin for eight weeks.

“I rang every week for eight weeks and was told someone would come but no one did.

Regrettably, this standard of service is not uncommon. As we have made clear in the two community clinical wastes service audits (see our Publications page for details and download), many Local Authorities provide a far less than perfect service. We have not measured in particular the service standards of Kirklees Council but we have audited its public facing web pages, as being indicative of overall approaches to quality service standards and information provision. Though we could not find any specific faults the underlying problem was that they said nothing about their services. That is a significant error, noted in ~45% of Local Authority web sites, where residents are not provided with information about the services available, how and when they operate, who to ask for help in setting up a service, and who to contact in the event of any problems. For this, Kirklees must score 0/10.

http://www.batleynews.co.uk/news/batley-pensioner-s-used-needle-nightmare-1-6063449