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Safe Injection Protocols Are Not Being Followed By Clinicians

Thanks to Laura Landro for shining light on unsafe injections in her WSJ blog, “Unsafe Injection Practices Persist Despite Education Efforts.”

Landro writes:

“A new push is underway to eliminate unsafe injection practices, which remain a persistent safety problem despite years of efforts to educate clinicians about the risks of re-using needles, syringes and drug vials.

In the U.S., failure to follow safe practices in delivering intravenous medications and injections has resulted in more than 30 outbreaks of infectious disease including hepatitis C, and the notification of more than 125,000 patients about potential exposure just in the last decade, according to health-care purchasing alliance Premier Inc.”

As a registered nurse this is unthinkable.  Learning to administer injections safely is “patient care 101.”  There is no excuse for any health care professional to unsafely inject patients.

Patients in the hospital, ambulatory surgical centers or outpatient settings, should expect that their nurses, doctors and other clinicians are administering injections safely. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Health in 30*

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