Follow these steps toward sharps safety
Follow these steps toward sharps safety
June Fisher, MD, director of the Training for Development of Innovative Control Technologies (TDICT) Project in San Francisco, offers the following advise about establishing a sharps safety evaluation program. Evaluation forms are available on the web site at www.tdict.org:
Conduct a task analysis (determining how the device is used). Create an evaluation
team that encompasses the different needs and has representatives of different
groups of users.
When you’re going to look at a specific device, get all the devices that exist
in that area. A bad device tells you a lot. You do an initial screening with
your team, using some systematic criteria. You’ll find one, two, or three devices
that fit those criteria.
Ask the manufacturer for 100 of each device. Does it really work? What’s the
failure rate? You will probably find it higher than what the manufacturers say.
Based on your task analysis, you develop some scenarios. Go to the clinical
unit and use the device in a situation. You put somebody on your team into the
bed, roiling around in the bed, with the guardrail up, and you approximate the
clinical situation. Once you devise scenarios, you use the same ones each time
you test a device.
Consider noise and temperature. To know that a device is engaged, you may have
to hear a click. People have a lot of protective clothing on. Did you use all
the protective clothing? It can be very uncomfortable.
By the time you’re gone through this, you have a pretty good idea of how suitable
the device is — what are the glitches and what do you need to institute when
you conduct training for everybody.
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