Underage allied-health students require special guidelines.

Barbara Harty-Golder is a pathologist-attorney consultant in Chattanooga, TN. She maintains a law practice with a special interest in medical law. She writes and lectures extensively on healthcare law, risk management, and human resource management. The situation involves policymaking based on science and common sense — as well as on law and regulation. Generally, students are entitled to protection from hazards. This is especially true when they are required to take a class. Underage students are another matter in that they are not necessarily able to consent to assume risks posed by performing invasive procedures. First, you may wish to determine whether state laws or laboratory regulations (which vary from place to place) prohibit underage students from performing invasive procedures. Many educational institutions prohibit these students from engaging in such procedures for a variety of reasons, including risk-management and consent concerns. Obtain a copy of your organization’s policies regarding acceptable risks in training modules or laboratory exercises. These guidelines should give you a sense of what to do. If guidelines do not exist, convene a committee to draft them. The guidelines should consider not only the risks involved in handling blood and body fluids but also the student’s level of education and experience. New students should receive more protection than experienced ones; one size definitely does not fit all. If appropriate, you may design your curriculum to provide more protection than the guidelines stipulate. Selecting exercises to include in a curriculum requires balancing the experience needed to master the material against the potential risks. Typing blood, for example, may be an interesting and effective exercise for highschool biology students. Given the fact, however, that it poses the risk of transmitting a variety of bloodborne diseases and that the exercise is not absolutely necessary to teach about blood groups (aside from the reputation that highschool students have of being notoriously careless in the lab), it probably should not be included.