Ensuring safe sharps management

Sharps injury reduction using Sharpsmart--a reusable sharps management system.

Sharps containers are associated with 11-13% of total sharps injuries (SI) yet have received little attention as a means of SI reduction. A newly developed reusable sharps containment system (Sharpsmart) was trialed in eight hospitals in three countries. The system was associated with an 86.8% reduction of container-related SI (CRSI) (P=0.012), a 25.7% reduction in non-CRSI (P=0.003), and a 32....

CompAr: Ensuring Safe Around Advice Composition

Advanced techniques in separation of concerns such as AspectOriented Programming, help to develop more maintainable and more efficient applications by providing means for modularizing crosscutting concerns. However, conflicts may appear when several concerns need to be composed for the same application, especially when dealing with around advice. We call this problem the Aspect Composition Issu...

[Ensuring safe blood in the Americas].

It is a pleasure to write an introductory statement for this special issue of the Revista Panamericana de Salud Pública/Pan American Journal of Public Health devoted to blood banks. This issue will deal not only with blood banks as the places where blood is collected and processed, but also with the whole spectrum of transfusion medicine. Blood has a special place in the culture of our civiliza...

Managing Sharps Waste in Andhra Pradesh: Introduction and scale-up of a sharps waste management program

Syringe pumps and start-up time: ensuring safe practice.

The start-up time is the delay between starting an infusion pump and the delivery of fluid at the set flow rate. Mechanical slack in syringe pumps can lead to start-up delays of an hour or more at low-flow rates. During this period no medication is delivered to the patient. The causes of the start-up time delay, its implications and methods of minimising the delay are explained.