Substandard hygiene practices and safe injection recommendations provided by medical and nursing staff might be placing the health of all patients at great risk. A recent observation of New Mexico medical students working in various medical and nursing facilities throughout the state revealed sanitary policy and procedure failure rates of approximately 35 percent.

These high failure rates of medical teams failing to follow hygienic recommendations to locate and use alcohol hand rubs and disinfection protocols when injecting the patient were higher than expected. The study revealed that, overall, nurses were more likely to take every hand hygiene opportunity (75 percent) to create a disinfected barrier between the patient and staff / equipment / supplies, followed by doctors (61 percent) and finally medical assistants (48 percent).

The study revealed that even though nursing homes and health facilities had developed, implemented and enforced policies and practices, staff members still failed to wash their hands when necessary more than one out of every three times. The problems involving a failure to follow recommended injection safety protocols was also high. The observations revealed that approximately one out of every five times, the medical staff failed to disinfect rubber vials with isopropyl alcohol. In addition, nearly one out of every six times, the staff failed to follow hand hygiene protocols when handling injection supplies.

Study researchers note that there are both perceived and real barriers to nursing staff following hand hygiene protocols. Often times, the staff is concerned about skin irritation caused by continuously washing hands, wearing gloves or creating a touch barrier relationship between the caregiver and patient. Other factors that lead to sloppy sanitation practices include understaffing, lack of training and a high workload.

A Legal Solution to Unsafe Injection Practices

The recently published Clinical Governance: An International Journal article: Law as a Tool to Promote Healthcare Safety provided insight into how the legal system can be used to penalize health care providers and caregivers who are engaging in unsafe substandard injection practices. The article suggests that a punishment could serve as a deterrence to causing harm to patients.

Finding ways to dissuade or deter caregivers’ sloppy sanitation practices could save tens of thousands of patients from harm and injury every year. The CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) has addressed this problem, noting that injury caused by substandard sanitation practices are completely preventable.

The CDC notes that compromising patient safety is always at the center of sloppy practices including using needles multiple times on different patients, using single use or single-dose drugs for more than one individual and failing to follow proper hygiene protocols when storing, preparing or handling medications and injections.

The paper released by the Clinical Governance identified various ways to hold medical staff legally responsible for unsafe injection practices. Some of these include:

• Hold the facility or physician legally responsible for preventing injury or harm to the patient;

• Use the Illinois civil court through medical malpractice lawsuits as an effective means to financially compensate every victim for the harm or injury they endure;

• Prosecute the caregivers as criminals as an effective deterrence from practices that lead to lifelong health conditions, disabilities or death of patients.

Basic Infection Control Practices

The CDC provides various measures involving proven injection practices and injection safety to ensure optimal protection for the patient, resident, medical staff or others. These practices can be found in the Standard Precautions section of the 2007 Guideline for Isolation Precautions. These guidelines identify the practices and minimum standards to be followed by healthcare personnel as a way to prevent transmitting infections between individuals in every healthcare setting.

Even though these recommendations have been available for years, many infection outbreaks still occur due to the failure of healthcare professionals in adhering to the standard precautions. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention list the most common ways the disease is transmitted in a medical environment. These include:

• Accessing a medication bag or vial using a previously used syringe to administer a drug to the patient and then reusing the vial contents on another patient.

• Reusing a syringe to administer a drug to more than a single patient, even when the syringe needle has been changed or when the injection medication was administered intravenously.

• Administering medications on multiple patients that have been packaged for single use or single dosage.

• Failing to follow required aseptic protocol during the preparation and administration of injections.

Since the start of the new millennium, more than 150,000 individuals in America have suffered injury or harm caused by unsafe medical injections, which are often the result of improper infection control practices. The failures by the medical staff in hospitals, doctor offices, nursing homes and other facilities have exposed individuals to blood borne illnesses including staph infections, surgical site infections, HIV, bloodstream infections, pneumonia, UTIs (urinary tract infections), hepatitis and life-threatening bacterial infections.