How secure are your sharps containers? Whether they are in a hospital clinic room or ward, a laboratory, GP surgery or in a public washroom or drug hotspot, sharps containers must be secure.

Containers must be securely assembled. When not in use, the closure should be engaged, though personally I am not entirely happy with the idea of the cover being opened and closed every 5 minutes since with some containers this brings fingers dangerously close to the content within.

The container itself must be located away from the floor where inquisitive children might roam. The evidence for this lies in the number of cases when an unsupervised child has gleefully placed their hand into the mouth of a sharps container as if pulling a prize from a lucky dip barrel.

So it is of concern that in London, Ontario, changes are being sought when it comes to the placement of the city’s needle collection bins after a child was able to grab a used syringe.

Diane Pozeg says the incident happened on July 29th while her son was in the public washroom at the Forks of the Thames while he was with a day camp.

Sharps containers are used to safely collect and store used syringes with needles attached, needles, razor blades, broken glass that has come into contact with blood or other bodily fluids and lancets. The London CAReS program, funded through the City of London, helps to clean and empty the bins and some City of London operations staff also tend to the containers.

She says the young boy was changing in order to play in the splash pad and managed to get his hand into the bin and pull out a syringe.

Pozeg says her son was able to get the needle all the way home where she found it as she was about to tuck him into bed.

“As I was prepping his bed, just fluffing up the sheets, I found a syringe and luckily it still had a cap on it,” Pozeg says. “He had kind of snuck it in there trying to hide it.”

“It just popped out and it just floored me finding it.”

http://www.am980.ca/2014/09/04/26667/

Every sharps container must be properly assembled, and securely located in a location where it cannot tip or fall, and where prying hands cannot reach inside. This extends to waste security of filled and sealed containers awaiting collection for disposal, which are still an occasional target for addicts, and beyond as the containers are processed by the disposal sector operators.