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To keep young, vulnerable patients safe from a potentially life-threatening disease, the University of North Carolina Health Care in Chapel Hill requires employees to have a vaccine that protects against a respiratory illness.
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Editor's note: In this issue, we continue our special report on needle safety issues. Safety needles are now commonplace at hospitals around the country, but sharps injuries persist both from conventional and safety devices. The problem may lie in selection of the device, inadequate training or, as in the OR, in resistance to sharps safety advances.
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As the nation's population ages, a growing number of registered nurses, certified nursing assistants and nurses' aides will be working in patients' homes rather than in hospitals. But many of them will be working without the basic safety devices that most nurses now take for granted, safety experts say.
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Amid the successes in sharps safety in hospitals in the 21st century, there is one glaring gap: The operating room. Sharps injuries there remain as much of a problem as they were in 2000, when the Needlestick Safety and Prevention Act was signed into law.
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"I was injured at work almost seven years ago. I am still going through financial difficulties. I can never return to nursing. I am left with a lot of nerve damage to my legs and continuous back pain. I receive about $400 biweekly from worker's comp. This is nowhere near my pre-injury pay. Learning to live with pain and limited mobility and chronic money problems has been the worst of it all. Nurse's post on an online forum of Work Injured Nurses' Group (WINGUSA)."
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"Health care personnel refers to all paid and unpaid persons working in health-care settings who have the potential for exposure to patients and/or to infectious materials, including body substances, contaminated medical supplies and equipment, contaminated environmental surfaces, or contaminated air.
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A new rapid tuberculosis test promises to help reduce health care worker exposures through early identification of patients.
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Karen Daley, PhD, MPH, RN, FAAN, remembers the stick as if it happened in slow-motion, the details still clear to her 12 years later. She had helped a co-worker draw blood from a patient in the emergency department. She turned to reach behind her for the sharps container. Mounted high on the wall, it was overfilled, but she couldn't see it well because it was above eye level.
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During last year's H1N1 influenza pandemic, health care workers inadvertently transmitted flu to their co-workers, in some cases triggering a hospital-based outbreak. That and other information about H1N1 transmission helped shape new guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that rely on vaccination, respiratory hygiene, and monitoring of ill employees by employee health professionals.
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Medical residents aren't the only hospital employees suffering from fatigue.
