“Almost 200 staff suffered injuries from contaminated needles or sharp medical instruments at the region’s main hospitals in just 12 months.

“Hull And East Yorkshire Hospitals NHS Trust said 197 members of staff sustained the injuries from needles or “sharps” between April 1 last year and March 31 this year.

“A Trust spokesman said: “A significant number of injuries were preventable if staff had adhered to the Trust’s policies and procedures relating to the safe handling and disposal of needles and sharps.”

http://www.thisishullandeastriding.co.uk/Needle-nightmare-hospital-staff-suffer-197/story-13235593-detail/story.html

This sorry situation is actually not unusual, and it is to be hoped that the eventual introduction of engineered safety devices will reduce the injury rate.

Many incidents will occur when needles and other sharps are being used but it is of concern that some are disposal-related incidents. What is unknown is how many disposal errors caused a sharps injury incident further down the line, to an ancillary of support worker or to a waste handler in the commercial sector. For both groups, reporting statistics will be carefully separated – many incidents may go unreported – thus under-representing the scale of this problem.

As noted previously on the Clinical Waste Discussion Forum, until sharps injuries are brought into the mandatory reporting schedule of RIDDOR, incidence data will always be an under-representation of the scale of injuries that occur. Though Blenkharn Environmental continues to petition for this legislative change, improvement is a long way off.