A potentially interesting paper published recently in the International Journal of Occupational Safety and Ergonomics reports the incidence of sharps injuries in hospital staff in Turkey.

Though the journal is inaccessible at present as it sits behind a firewall the abstract tells of sharps injury occurring in one hospital collected between January-October 2008 using Adverse Event Notification.

Outpatient clinics experienced the most injuries at 28%, followed by the Internal Diseases Inpatient Unit with 21% and the Medical Waste Room with 14%. We are not told in the abstract which staff were injured in each location However, it is stated that, on average, 0.2% of all self-reported injuries were sharps injuries, averaging one injury per month; housekeeping staff sustained 64% of such injuries, nurses sustained 36% (5 incidents). Thus housekeepers must have been the majority injury victim in each of these locations

That’s an incredible spilt of injuries, with housekeeping staff suffering almost twice as many injuries as nurses. That paints an appalling picture, since it is the nurses who use needles and other sharps and who would be expected to have a higher injury or incident rate.

There may be issues of reporting with, for whatever reason, nurses failing to report the majority of injuries but this is not mentioned by the authors.

If that pattern of results is indeed correct then waste handlers and laundry workers too must face a high incidence of sharps injuries since on can only assume that sharps disposal is woefully inadequate and that discarded sharps find their way to inappropriate containers, in fact anywhere but a sharps bin!