A Braintree mum is disgusted after finding a discarded needle in a county park.

She was taking a walk around the lakes at Great Notley Country Park, popular with young families, with her partner when she claims she almost sat on the needle, which had been left on a ledge.

Great Notley Country Park, which features a play trail and children’s park area, attracts thousands of visitors every year, particularly young families.

Essex County Council, which runs the country park, insisted it was unaware of the find but reassured people it was an isolated incident, which sounds more like a stock answer rather than a reassuringly robust explanation that might be backed by hard evidence.

The report raises some important questions, beyond those questions which might challenge a rather dismissive response from the Council.

Neither Essex County Council and Braintree District Council had any information concerning arrangements for managing clinical wastes or for the reporting and retrieval of discarded needles in their area when audited as part of the 2011/12 Local Authority Clinical Waste/Sharps audit, which does not bode well.

But why are we disgusted at finding a discarded needle? Does or disgust increase when finding a needle in a nice country park, or lessen when these appear in a litter strew back alley? Is repulsion linked to a rather common fear of needles, or to aversion to blood?

Are we afraid of the infection risks? Perhaps we are concerned more about the wider impacts on society, or increasing crime related to drug dealing? What about the impact on property prices?

Perhaps the issues are more complex, and we are concerned about many, maybe all, of these issues? That may be quite likely, but if we stand back and look at these issues in the round perhaps we should re-evaluate our opinions and move away from an assumption solely of risk due to infection, which is real though rarely occurs, to a focus that is directed more toward the practicalities of good social order through policing, education, drug support and counselling, engagement and awareness, and monitoring and evaluation.

This all costs a great deal of money. It’s the last bit where things go wrong, the monitoring and evaluation. Boiled down, it excuses that regrettably frequent head in the ground management style that exclaims every event to be an isolated incident. A refusal to see the wider picture, and the broad implication and impact on communities, robes them of the appropriate support measures and resources necessary to make them work.

There is so much more required to manage than prompt and efficient little picking and needle retrieval. That is one important part of the plan, but is a little like the pyramid of safety priorities so beloved of safety managers.

This puts PPE items at the lowest point in prevention of injury, which is perhaps akin to the last resort of little picking. However, the more robust and high priority interventions that are safety in implementation and almost certainly more effective are elimination and substitution, or in this situation of drug support and counselling, engagement and awareness etc. Engineering might equate to improved policing and the use of secure sharps bins in drug hotspots, safe injection rooms,and needle exchange schemes.

All key manoeuvres, likely to be effective. Importantly, they can deliver lasting improvement. But too often cost gets in the way – a rather false and short-sighted economy – and society’s own rejection of interventions that might be seen to assist or support or more generally to make life easier for people who inject drugs.

It is a recipe for disaster if interventions are reliant only on litter picking and worse, litter picking on the cheap which is reliant only on receiving reports of needle finds from members of the public. Even worse are those strategies that expect people to pick up needles ‘to protect others’ rather than provide an effective service, as noted repeatedly in the waste audits.