The use of a pioneering safety device at Manchester Royal Infirmary’s A&E department has reduced potentially fatal needlestick injuries for front-line staff. Recorded cannula related needlestick injuries fell to zero following take up of the safety cannula, devised by B. Braun Medical, which features a self-activating safety clip that automatically and permanently shields the needle’s sharp end when it is retracted from a vein.
Jimmy Stuart is clinical director of emergency services, and consultant in charge of the accident and emergency department at Manchester Royal, which sees approximately 148,000 patients a year – or between 400 and 500 people a day. He commented: “Before we introduced this safety device we were running at around 19 needlestick injuries a year in this department.
In the year after its introduction, we did not have a single incident – completely eliminating cannula-related injuries at no extra cost.”The drive to prevent sharps injuries were fuelled by an incident ten years ago when a junior doctor, who wanted to be a surgeon, suffered a sharps injury and contracted Hepatitis C.
Nurses across the UK are now calling for widespread adoption of devices such as the safety cannula in a bid to cut down on needle injuries, which affect 48% of nurses during their careers and are a major cause of exposure to blood-borne viruses, such as Hepatitis B and C and HIV.
A recent survey by the Royal College of Surgeons reports that nearly half of the 2,000 nurses polled do not have access to safe needle devices and demonstrates that 11 NHS staff have caught hepatitis from accidental needle jabs, with five reported cases of HIV transmission since figures were first collected in the late 1990‘s.Needlestick and sharps injuries are among the top four types of accident suffered by NHS staff and Jimmy Stuart’s department serves a city where up to 40% of the drug using population is Hepatitis C positive.
