Colleagues in Massachusetts deserve commendation for their great diligence in collating detailed statistics on the incidence and circumstances of sharps injury among healthcare workers in that State.

The level of detail is magnificent, but sadly the data lives up to its title and is restricted to healthcare staff only. Though housekeepers and maintenance staff are included, other ancillary and support staff and waste handlers providing contract disposal services to the hospitals included in these studies are not included.

see http://www.mass.gov/eohhs/docs/dph/occupational-health/injuries-hospital-2010.pdf

and http://www.mass.gov/eohhs/docs/dph/occupational-health/injuries-hospital.pdf

The data tables include a mass of information concerning the demographics of injured person, employment category, device or implement causing injury, the circumstances of injury, when and how it occurred etc. The information is invaluable to all of those studying sharps injury.

Care is required in the interpretation of these data since the exclusion of downstream injury to waste handlers – excluded perhaps because of the difficulty of reliable data capture – adds weight to the school of thought that sharps injury to these support service workers are infrequent almost to the point that they can be discounted. That is a dangerous game.

Though the Massachusetts data show that the greatest incidence of injury is in clinical staff (physicians and nurses) it is dangerous indeed to read into the data that show far fewer injuries among support groups as evidence that for them the risk is somewhat lower. In fact, the reverse may be true since, weighted against numbers of staff in each group, the risk for support staff may in fact be greater than for the clinical staff groups.