SafetyTip Needles

Nurses and other frontline health care workers in Ontario will soon be equipped with safety needles and respirators for better protection against needle-stick injuries and dangerous infections.

The provincial government announced Thursday, Aug. 23, that it will stockpile 55 million N95 respirators, to protect health workers from SARS, avian influenza, and other airborne infections.

The province also introduced amendments into its Occupational Health and Safety Act requiring all hospital to use safety-engineered needles or needle-less systems starting Sept. 1, 2008, and ordering other health care facilities (such as doctors’ offices, specimen collection centers, laboratories, psychiatric clinics, long-term care homes, and ambulances) to phase them in over the next three years.

The ministers of health and labor announced the new regulations at the North York General Hospital, where nurses were heavily exposed in the front lines when the 2003 SARS outbreak hit Toronto.

In the provincial inquiry in the aftermath of the 2003 SARS outbreak, the panel recommended use of the respirators to provide more effective protection. The panel lamented the fact that health workers at the time were not adequately protected. SARS killed 44 people in Toronto, including two nurses and a doctor. 

Of 375 people infected with SARS at the time, nearly half (45 per cent) were health care workers. The Ontario Nurses Association urged the government to ensure more protection for nurses and health workers in case of similar airborne disease outbreaks, like pandemic influenza.

Safety needles will protect nurses against the spread of blood-borne diseases like HIV and hepatitis C. The nurses association says 33,000 needle-stick injuries occur in Ontario yearly and 58 percent of those are injuries to nurses.

A Toronto hospital reveals that when they started using safety needles two years ago, needle-stick injuries dropped 20 per cent in the first year and 80 per cent by the second. A number of Ontario hospitals already utilize safety-engineered needles. As a result, they have seen reductions in injuries and workplace stress among health workers.

The new rules on the use of safety needles are long overdue. In May, dozens of nurses rallied outside the legislative building to press for faster action on stalled legislation to make safety needles mandatory in hospitals. Two bills had been proposed since 2005 but these always died on the legislature’s order paper.

Many other provinces in Canada (British Columbia, Nova Scotia, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta) have already imposed mandatory use of safety needles, while the United States Congress passed them into law in 2001.