The International Healthcare Worker Safety Center — one of the original surveillance systems for healthcare worker needlesticks — has made a dramatic transition to an independent non-profit center that is widening the net beyond bloodborne pathogens to include worker exposures to Clostridium difficile and MRSA.
“This is a great way to branch out while keeping bloodborne pathogens at our core,” says Amber Mitchell, DrPh, MPH, CPH, the new president and executive director of what is now called the International Safety Center. “We will be focusing on the healthcare-based and the community-based pathogens that are becoming more and more prevalent.”
The center will continue to offer free standardized recording and tracking of sharps injuries and blood and body fluid contacts through the forms and database that comprise the Exposure Prevention Information Network (EPINet) database. The original Healthcare Worker Safety Center was housed at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville as founded in 1991 and directed by needlestick prevention pioneer Janine Jagger, PhD, MPH, a professor of medicine at UVA. In turning the reins over to Mitchell and colleagues, Jagger said in a statement that with emerging infectious diseases like Ebola and resurging ones like measles, the work of hospital employee health professionals has never been more important.
As part of the transition the center is no longer based at UVA, instead operating as an online collaborative effort and a new website (http://bit.ly/1BqbDpG).
“This type of advocacy center is really best run as an independent nonprofit,” Mitchell explains. “Contributions to an academic center have a tremendous amount of overhead — sometimes as high as 45%. We thought that if 100% of contributions could go toward protection of healthcare workers, that was money well allocated.”
The International Safety Center will be an extension of the original center, with an enhanced focus on collecting and analyzing data that better identifies healthcare worker safety hazards. The new center is designed to help hospitals, clinics, and other healthcare facilities measure blood and body fluid exposures, sharps injuries, and needlesticks to help prevent worker exposures to dangerous pathogens like HIV, hepatitis C, measles and methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA).
The infectious disease threats in occupational health have changed with hepatitis B vaccine being administered in childhood and HIV now a chronic disease for those under appropriate care.
“People are living longer with HIV,” Mitchell says. “There is an enormous amount of comorbidities and coinfections like MRSA and C. difficile. So while the high-risk exposures may still be the bloodborne pathogens, the contact with these coinfections is what we really want to get at.”
To be clear, EPINet tracks exposures, not actual infections. In 2000 the center played a key role in passage of the Needlestick Safety and Prevention Act, which expanded needle safety requirements and oversight by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Mitchell collaborated with the UVA center at that time as a key point person at OSHA working to get the law enacted.
