Sharps discarded in hotel rooms

Stuck in wall of motelA woman visiting Portland, Oregon, was greeted by a shocking scene in her motel room: dirty needles stuck in the wall.

She visited the city on April 10, 2015 to attend the Portland Swap Meet at the Expo Center. She booked a room through the website Hotels.com and ended up at the Americas Best Value Inn and Suites in Northeast Portland.

She checked in to room 249 and started videotaping the experience after she discovered what appear to be dirty needles stuck in a wall of the room.

“This is going in to our room. The room appears to be nice. Notice that the beds are messy. Look up close, there’s dirty spots,” Shipman narrates on the video.

“Went to plug my phone into the jack, and looked up, and low and behold, look what we have,” she explained.

She discovered two syringes stuck in the wall like darts.

“One still has stuff in it. This one, you can’t really see from the phone, but there’s blood down the wall, and on the end of the needle”.

It is often not considered how often sharps and associated drug waste, and waste from diabetic blood testing and insulin administration, is discarded in hotel rooms.

 

Take a look next time you stay in a hotel. Check out the housekeeping cart, and spot the sharps bin. What I have never seen is graspers of other tools including sharps-resistant gloves, and we can only hope that the staff have been properly trained in safe retrieval as much as sharps bin use.

Hotels rely on a high proportion of short term, seasonal and temporary staff. When a sharps injury to a staff member has occurred, it seems not unlikely that a Court will be particularly sympathetic to a claim for damages, and generous with the award since this is now an entirely predictable risk.

 

 

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