Safety-engineered devices: technique progress

EU directive 200/32 was implemented one year ago. It introduced fundamental preventive measures to avoid exposure to pathogen risk, such as forbidding recapping needles with devices that are not safety-engineered and making the use of safety-engineered devices a legal requirement.
The importance of assessing and preventing risk has been long documented, starting with OSHA data, according to which every year around 1 million sharps injuries take place, amounting to 800,000-5,120,00 € costs.

Accidental sharps injuries for healthcare workers can be prevented. It is just necessary to:
- Put into place standard precautions, such as the WHO recommendations on hand-washing; indeed standard precautions can already reduce the frequency and the consequences of exposure to biological risk.
- Develop, validate and introduce safer operational procedures;
- Asses, adopt and use safety-engineered devices, after the staff has received proper training on how to use them
- Raise awareness among healthcare workers, inform them and give them the necessary training, on risk, using personal and collective protective equipment, the importance of reporting incidents and on the duties and rights of each worker (People for Healthcare Administration, Safety and Efficiency – PHASE Study Group)
Taking these steps, it is possible to get excellent results, as published by PHASE regarding the situation in Europe: